Introduction to Power Apps

A tutorial by Peter Kalmström

The Microsoft Power Platform, is a collection of products for building end-to-end business solutions. The different parts can be connected to each other and to many other apps, data sources and platforms.

In this tutorial series, we will focus on the Power Platform components Power Apps and Dataverse. We will use SharePoint data in many of the apps.

Power Platform graphics

The kalmstrom.com Tips section already has a series of tutorials on Power Automate, recorded in 2018, that focuses on automation when the data is stored in SharePoint. Our book about the same subject, SharePoint Flows from Scratch, was updated in March 2022.

We also have a few earlier tutorials on Power Apps, where wel use Power Apps to customize a SharePoint list form and create powerapps directly from two SharePoint list apps, Projects and Phone Messages. Most of the demos in this series were however created during September-December 2022.

Working from outside the office is convenient and gives freedom to move around, but we often have to be content with the same interface as in the PC. This is not optimal.

To use a PC interface in a small touch screen can create issues, but Microsoft has given a solution to the problem: the no-code development service Power Apps.

Microsoft Power Apps icon

From a user perspective, apowerapp can be regarded as a new view for the data that thepowerapp is connected to. Data can be fetched from many different sources. Here, we will get the data from SharePoint in the first tutorials, and after that we will use Dataverse as data source for ourpowerapps.

With Power Apps, IT professionals can create apps for both mobile and desktop devices and distribute them to users within the organization. Microsoft 365 users can even create their own apps, because if you keep it simple, it is not very difficult.

Power Apps cannot only be used with Microsoft 365. It can also be connected to cloud services such as Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, Dropbox and OneDrive and on-premises systems as SharePoint, SQL Server, Oracle databases and SAP.