The building blocks of a Power App
In our Power Apps training in Australia, we help our attendees to build a running Power App during the session. The hands-on problem-solving method helps the users to understand the building blocks and envision the use of Power Apps in their organizations. If you’re new to this technology, then the blog link below will help you to get started:
What is Microsoft Power Platform
The Microsoft Power Platform is a powerful set of applications that allow you to automate processes, build solutions, analyze data, and create virtual agents. Below are the major components of the Power Platform.
- Power BI is a business analytics service by Microsoft.
- Power Apps is application development for low code/no code apps.
- Power Automate (formerly known as Flow) enables process automation.
- Power Virtual Agents also known as Chatbots are intelligent virtual bots.
- AI Builder is turnkey solution that brings the power of AI (Artificial Intelligence)
through a point-and-click experience, and it can automatically record information from Invoices, POs & other documents which comes as standard formats (JPG/PDF).
Power Apps and Office 365 Licenses
Licensing programs are channels where you can buy Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents & AI Builder Service. You can follow the below link to check various options to buy Power Apps license.
- https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/
- https://www.microsoft.com/en-ww/microsoft-365/compare-microsoft-365-enterprise-plans
Power Apps Community Plan
The PowerApps Community plan gives you a free development environment for individual use. With your individual environment you can,
- Learn to build business apps and workflows with the full functionality of Power Apps
and Power Automate.
- Connect to any data source using 100+ available out of the box connectors.
- Use Dataverse to build Model Driven Apps & Portal.
- Develop apps shared by other users who have license to build and share Power Apps.
Introduction to Environment
An environment is a space to store, manage, and share your organization’s business data, apps, chatbots, flows and AI Builders. It also serves as container to separate apps that might have different roles, security requirements, or target audiences. How you choose to use environments depends on your organization and the apps you’re trying to build. For example,
- You can choose to build your apps, flows, chatbots, AI Builders in a single
environment.
- You might create separate environments that group the test and production versions of
your apps, flows, chatbots and AI Builders.
- You might create separate environments that correspond to specific teams or
departments in your company, each containing the relevant data and apps for each audience.
- You might also create separate environments for different global branches of your
Company.
Power Apps Home Page
You can visit the Power Apps Home Page by clicking on the link https://make.powerapps.com. On the Power Apps Home page, you can select or change the environment to work within. You can also click to create an app or to edit an existing app. You will find menu items to work with Connectors, Dataverse, Flows, Chatbots, AI Builders etc.
Below is the Power Apps Home Page screen.
Power App Studio
From Power Apps Home Page screen, when you click to create or edit a canvas app, it will take you to a new window where Power Apps Studio will open. In Power Apps studio, you can create and develop a Power App canvas app. The Power App studio has various online tools which are used to develop Power Apps Canvas Apps with drag and drop control features.
Below is the Power Apps Studio Screen to develop and edit Canvas App.
The elements tagged in the above image are,
Power Apps Browser, Mobile and Desktop App
You can use a Power Apps Canvas app using any of the below 3 ways,
- Any browser by accessing the app link.
- In mobile by installing the Microsoft Power Apps application.
.
- In laptop/ desktop by using the Power Apps application for windows.
To develop/edit a Power Apps Canvas app, one can use only browser. Power Apps application in Mobile and Desktop are used only to use the app after it’s developed and published.
Conclusion:
Microsoft’s Power platform provides easy to use interface where users can build business solutions, analyze data and perform various business handling and optimization tasks. Power Apps is a no-code/low-code platform developed by Microsoft to build business apps without any prior app building knowledge. Power Apps community plan gives you a free environment to work on. In this blog post, various building blocks of the power app such as environment, studio and power apps home page are discussed. Towards the end of the blog, three ways to create a canvas power app are also presented.
If you found Power Apps interesting and can envision a business app then here’s the link a full-day training session with our Microsoft Certified trainers: