Our generation wants everything at their fingertips that too in a fizzy manner with less effort. With PowerApps coming in just at the right time, providing the perfect platform which gives us the freedom to work where and when we desire, the needs of this generation are fulfilled. The templates enhance the experience of coding, making it much easier for the average user.
What is PowerApps?
PowerApps is a collection of apps, connectors and services, on which readymade template gives rapid development environment to build custom apps according to your needs. In PowerApps one can develop custom business apps where the user can integrate data from various data platforms (Microsoft Data Verse ) or different online and default data sources (such as SharePoint, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, Microsoft Excel, and so on).
PowerApps gives freedom to people for the app-building experience by enabling users to create full-featured, custom apps without writing code.
There are three types of apps we can create by using PowerApps
1.Canvas App: The Canvas app is an app in the PowerApps platform on which we can design and build an app by using canvas without writing any code. It gives us the exposure of creating an app by just dragging and dropping elements onto the canvas.
2.Model-driven: The traditional way of adding functionalities like forms, tables, chatbot, slider, counter, and many more other functionalities in our website or in the app requires a lot of research and code onto it. This pain point is addressed by model driven app where we can access all those functionalities fetched from the app designer tool.
3.Portals: PowerApps portals Studio to create and customize our website. It contains various options to add and configure web pages, components, forms, and lists.
Top 5 Benefits of using PowerApps
- Fast and reliable: Traditionally when businesses thought of any app creation, they started calculating their timelines associated with the readiness of the app with the help of their development team. Add to that the customization needs on the app and the deadlines tend to shift rightwards. But in PowerApps any business app can be developed in a very short span and shared within teammates or within an organization according to their custom needs without compromising on the timelines.
- Easy to use: PowerApps is known as no code low code platform so development of the app is very easy to use by just dragging and dropping the element onto the canvas much like the way we create our presentation on Microsoft PowerPoint. It wouldn’t be wrong to say - creating an app is as easy as making our presentation by using slides.
- Cost effective: When an organization thinks of any business app first, they have to brainstorm about costing, expensive professional developer with high cost of maintenance. PowerApps gives organizations the luxury of saying goodbye to expensive developers as well as reducing the cost of maintenance.
- Mobile Friendly: PowerApps is mobile friendly which is UI responsive. It has its own app that users can download from the play store and app store.
- Security: PowerApps gives you complete control of your applications through the administration center, giving employees extensive user control options to easily manage data and permits. That means all levels of accessibility and visibility of data can be easily tracked and controlled.
7 steps to create your own first app using PowerApps
- Connect to the data source. Download your data according to your needful. Example: You have data in excel form of flooring estimates. The first step is to download it and save it on your organization's one drive account.
2. Login into Microsoft Account: Go to https://make.powerapps.com and sign in
with your organizational account.
3. Select your data source from the home tab as I have data from excel Sheet I have chosen excel.
4. Under Connections, select OneDrive for Business and browse to the file location. You might need to select New Connection to see the OneDrive for Business connection.
5. Under Choose an Excel file, select the FlooringEstimates.xlsx file.
- Under Choose a table, select the Flooring Estimates table.
- Select Connect on the bottom right.
PowerApps generates the app by inspecting your data and matching it with PowerApps capabilities so that you get a working app as a starting point.
Curious to get your organization's own PowerApps? Get in touch with our tribe lead for more details.
