Microsoft Power Apps is a low-code/no-code solution that allows professional developers and non-IT professionals to create powerful applications much faster than with regularly developed applications. In this course, we will look at the core capabilities of Power Apps and how they help businesses automate and enhance repetitive, mundane, and time-consuming tasks.
We will cover canvas apps, model-driven apps, and portals, as well as their use cases and the differences between them. We'll also walk you through how to build each one. Finally, we'll take a look at the Power Apps Component Framework and how this allows developers to add even more functionality to standard Power Apps.
Learning Objectives
- Get a foundational understanding of canvas apps, model-driven apps, and portals, including their use cases and features
- Use data sources, controls, and formulas to build, share, and publish your own canvas apps
- Plan, build, share, and publish model-driven apps
- Create and customize your own portal and monitor user behavior on your portal
- Learn about the Power Apps Framework and how it can enhance the user experience of your apps
Intended Audience
This course is intended for both IT professionals and non-technical professionals looking to automate and enhance business processes for mobile and desktop users.
Prerequisites
There are no prerequisites for this course but any computer coding knowledge and even basic Excel knowledge would be beneficial when learning about Power Apps.
Back in Power Apps, in order to see the templates for portals you have to have Dynamics 365 apps enabled. Otherwise you will only see the portal from blank option. Here are the different portal templates available: Community Portal, Customer Self-Service Portal, Employee Self-Service Portal, Partner Portal and Customer Portal. To create one, simply select the template you want to create. Follow the simple instructions and you'll have a nice head start on creating your first portal. But since you might not have Dynamics 365 right now, I'll be showing you how to create and customize various aspects of portals as we build one from scratch.
I'll select portal from blank, we'll call our portal, you guessed it, First Portal. We'll also need to give it its own address. Let's simply say FirstPortalDemo and check to make sure this address isn't in use. Once inside of Power Apps Portal designer, you can see that it's somewhat similar to Canvas Apps. Over here on the left, I can customize pages, components, themes and templates. As you might see, our portal is broken up into different sections that can be customized. To change text, for example, I can simply double-click inside of this text component and change Hey to Hello. To apply a theme to our portal, we can select our design icon. It is possible to upload Custom CSS but this will be covered in other courses. But know that this can add a lot more customization as far as design goes to your portal. For now, let's enable basic theme and select one of these themes we have to choose from. In the next lecture, we'll go over common portal customizations.
Ben is a Power Apps and Power Automate Specialist for Sovereign SP and has been using Power Apps, Power Automate, and SharePoint since 2017. Since then, he has built 100+ solutions using these amazing Microsoft tools. He loves helping others realize what technology can do and how it helps automate and enhance business processes. Most of all, though, he loves how these tools help make people’s jobs easier. The phrase, “This will make things so much easier!” is why he's in the IT business.
Ben Fetters lives in South Ogden, Utah, with his amazing wife and brand-new baby girl. A Weber State University Business Administration graduate, he loves to create businesses and help current businesses improve.