Introduction to Power Apps

Welcome to your Microsoft Power Apps learning journey! Let's start with a brief introduction of what Power Apps is — and where canvas apps fit within it.

Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, and connectors that lets you create custom business apps without coding. It provides a rapid development environment where you can build apps according to your business needs. With Power Apps, you can build professional solutions using AI-powered development, prebuilt templates, and connectors to hundreds of data sources and systems.

Power Apps supports three types of apps:

• Canvas apps: Screen-based apps you design from a blank canvas or a template. You control the layout, connect to virtually any data source, and use Power Fx formulas to define how the app behaves. Canvas apps work on phones, tablets, and browsers.
• Model-driven apps: Apps built on top of Microsoft Dataverse. The layout is largely generated from your data model, making them well-suited for complex business processes and data-heavy scenarios.
• Power Pages sites: External-facing websites built on Dataverse, intended for users outside your organization.

In this module, we focus on building canvas apps. By the end, you'll know how to navigate the maker portal, connect to data, and build a working canvas app from an Excel spreadsheet.

Power Apps can connect to data you're already using. It can provide you with a vehicle to interact with your data on any device that can connect to Power Apps. It works in web browsers and on mobile devices.

The best thing about Power Apps is that you don't need coding experience to begin using it. The interface in Microsoft Power Platform enables you to produce solutions that can transform your manual business processes to digital ones.

With Power Apps, you can:

• Build an app quickly by connecting with existing data.
• Connect to the cloud services and data sources that you're already using.
• Share your apps instantly so that coworkers can use them on their phones and tablets.

When it comes to using Power Apps to get things done and keep people informed, your options are nearly limitless. The following examples can help you think about how to use an app, instead of traditional paper notes, to run your business:

• Equipment in the field: Often, company representatives who visit customers in the field carry clipboards to help guarantee a paper trail of parts with scheduled replacement dates. By running an app on a tablet, reps can look up the customer's equipment, see a picture of a part, test and analyze the part, and then order new parts. Reps can perform these tasks on-site instead of leaving the customer's warehouse.
• Restaurant employee management: Employees of a large restaurant might fill out work schedules and vacation requests on a piece of paper on a wall. With Power Apps running on everyone's smartphone, employees can open the app to record the same information anywhere, anytime. The app can even send reminders for the start of the next day's shift.

If you're a beginner with Power Apps, this module gets you going quickly with canvas apps. If you're already familiar with canvas apps, it ties concepts together and fills in the gaps.