Create Recurring Tasks App in Power Apps

An Excel tutorial by Peter Kalmström

In the demo below, Peter Kalmström continues to work with the Recurring Tasks solution that he has used in several previous demos already. Here, Peter creates an app for the tasks that are due today and have not yet been finished.

The app shows today's tasks from the Excel Tasks table, and when a task has been finished, the user can tap a Check icon to mark it as "Done". That info goes back to the Status field in the Tasks table. In the app, the finished tasks will be filtered out, so that the app always shows only tasks that are not yet performed.

In this demo, Peter does nothing to enhance the look of the app, as this is easily done with the built-in Power Apps tools. Instead, Peter focuses on function, which might be more difficult to achieve. He adds a heading and a gallery to the blank app, connects the gallery to the Excel Tasks table and changes the default layout and formulas, so that the app works as intended.

All steps to create the app are performed in the Power Apps Studio at https://make.powerapps.com. Changes to the tasks in the gallery are made for all of them in the first instance.

In Power Apps, create a blank canvas app with the phone format.
Add a text label, Open Recurring Tasks, on top.
Add data from Excel Online (Business) and connect to the dataset in SharePoint or OneDrive where the Recurring Tasks Excel worksheet is stored. Select the Recurring Tasks file.
Choose to connect to the Tasks table and use the unique ID column in that table. (Refer to the previous article.)
Insert a vertical gallery below the label and connect it to the Tasks table data source.
Change the gallery layout to Title and subtitle.
Edit the fields, so that the subtitle shows the Date value in the Tasks table and the title shows the Title value.
To show the dates in a suitable format, select the date field and change its Text formula into: Date(ThisItem.Date),Month(ThisItem.Date),Day(ThisItem.Date)
Replace the Next icon with a Check icon.
To update the Tasks table and add a Done value to the checked item's Status column, change the Check icon's OnSelect formula into: Patch(Tasks,ThisItem,{Status:"Done"})
Play the app and check one of the tasks as finished. Make sure that the task's Done value has been propagated to the Excel Tasks table.
To filter out the checked tasks, select the gallery and change its Items property into: Filter(Tasks,IsBlank(Status))
Test the app by checking one of the remaining tasks and making sure that it disappears from the app.

If you want to learn more about Power Apps, refer to our book Power Apps with SharePoint from Scratch and the Power Apps Tips series, where we also use Dataverse as data source for the apps.

In the next demo, Peter will get more info from the powerapp to the Excel Tasks table without burdening the app users.

Date formats

When you watch the demo, you will probably notice that the dates have different formats in Excel and the powerapp. In Excel, the dates are in ISO format, YYY-MM-DD, while the app shows them in the US format, MM/DD/YYYY. If you have another date format than the ISO on your system, you will see the same difference if you follow Peter's instructions. Here is the explanation:

Peter is doing some code based manipulation of the dates in Excel, and therefore he wants them to be displayed as ISO format. Other formats tend to introduce confusion. In the powerapp the date format is the default system date, and on Peter's computer that is the US date format, not the ISO.

The Excel back-end is intended as a database layer that is mostly used by admins. They will enter new templates and modify intervals etc. and will most likely be ok with the ISO format. In Power Apps, there is no code based date manipulation, so keeping the locale default format is better for the app users.