5 things every Power Apps beginner needs to know

let's just talk about some of those powerapps challenges right so your powerapps beginner or maybe you're a seasoned Pro who's kind of Faking it it's okay all right either way we're going to go over today is five core tips plus a bonus one okay I wasn't allowed to call it six tips I don't know why anyway five core tips that help beginners with powerapps right so we're gonna talk about forums we're talking about renaming controls we'll talk about error messages and then just some things about you know powerapps Wants What It Wants right so we're just gonna kind of go over these core things so nothing super technical just a bunch of little thoughts that'll help you hopefully transition from beginner scared of everything to that intermediate we're like all right I kind of got an idea what's going on die fun well there's a switcher to my desktop and take a look all right the first tip is one that causes me great pain and that's what I'm gonna tell you that forms are fine right so for the forms control is very easy to use and a great starting point now the reason I made this my first tip is because if you watched a bunch of YouTube videos or how to's or you've seen some cool blog posts it's really easy to be like hey you know everybody says I should always use patch right and as a seasoned Pro I always use patch I do not like forms right but forms are great to start and we're in the beginning all you want is Success you need to win forms are going to help you do that so let's just go over here and build a quick app with forms right so first thing you gotta do is add a data source some quick over here in data I'm going to add data I'm going to search for SharePoint then I'm going to click on SharePoint right here choose my connection and keep in mind that this would work the same if your data source was SQL Excel dataverse it doesn't matter and this isn't SharePoint specific here but now we're gonna go to powerapps videos because it's my SharePoint site I'm going to search for my employees list click on that and then click connect down here under my face okay so now that you've got a data source once again I don't care which one you do I'm going to choose a tree View and then if you just insert a gallery connect it up to your list right we're not trying to teach this we're just trying to overdo it and so then we're going to insert a form drag it over here with your form then all I need you to do is choose a data source that's that same list employees this is going to automatically add some or all columns just depending on where you're at with things and then the thing that they don't call out is up here in the drop down you've got to choose item this is where you tell what to show in the form and then here you would just use your gallery names to Gallery one dot selected notice I'm using tab complete to make my life easier Bingo Bingo and if you insert a button and then here you would just say submit form and the name of your form like so and there you go just like that I have an app right we could play we could save we could publish it or I could go in here and choose Greg the truck driver but hey his favorite color is blue and I press this button and it saves right forms are okay they they have challenges they can't do fancy things necessarily so so here's an example of an app like where we need patch right so yes we start with forms but like this one is one that I use to check out quantities of stuff right it not only lets you choose how many you want to borrow you can sign the form all of this stuff right these are the type of things that you will evolve into complex apps like this I'll put a link to how to build this app up there this needs patch right you will get to the point where you need patch but today you're a beginner using forms totally A-Okay all you're looking to do is most likely capture some data right so whether the forms in edit mode new mode whatever like there's a bunch more to learn about forms I'm not oversimplifying it but I want you to understand that it's okay to start with forms you do not have to get hung up on people like me that say Hey I would never use forms I would never use forms but I'm not you you're still learning so that's my first tip for beginners forums are okay now if you're struggling with what I just did there I care whoa whoa you went so fast why'd you do all right remember I've got a great training class a free 101 level training class you just sign up your email address no money no credit cards and nothing and that will walk you through how to build your first app and do all that if you don't want my training class I don't know why all right the other thing I remember is we open a new tab here is it the starting price of what I teach in that class is you go here to create and then what you're going to do is you're just going to choose like an arcade SharePoint you're going to connect the SharePoint here you're going to find that same site again powerapps videos and find that same list so employees for me click connect under my face again and in like three seconds it is going to build as a complete working app this working app it's a three screen app that lets you edit create delete records all of those fun things is wonderful this is where you should learn you should come mess with this app because it has the gallery like we just did it has the form this is how you learn this is how you use forms this can be the foundation of your app start here alright so for number two flow is both your friend and your foe right what I know okay so one of the things that I cannot stress enough with you is that sometimes I see a beginners like they went and watched a video once again it's always videos fault they watched a video that showed how to send an email with flow and they're like hey that's really easy I can do that great but what I don't want you to do is come and hear your power app and add that flow if all you want that flow do is send an email right if power apps can do what you want to do then you are always better off to do the work in power apps and keep it all in the powerapps bubble all right there's a lot of things that only flow can do I upload a file we need to flow uh sending you know teams adaptive cards and getting responses we need a flow creating a PDF we need a float there's a lot of things that only flow can do so don't get me wrong we integrate flow and powerapps all the time but I don't want you integrating flow just for the sake of having flow in here all right if you needed to send an email from powerapps what would you do right we just made a new screen real quick we go here data sources we would say add data we would search for Outlook make sure you choose Office 365 Outlook we'll click on that use our connection this will add this as a data source into our app just like so and now you can just have a simple button here and this button you would just do Office 365 Outlook dot send email V2 right there then you just fill in the blanks look it's telling you I need a 2 a subject and a body so the two let's just have it send to the logged in user right so user.email subject subject and then body body there you go that button will send an email now you would just learn to fill in the blanks as you go but there's no reason to go build that in a flow and then have integrated flow and a power app right that so that's where I say flow is both friend and foe because a lot of times I see beginners incorporating flows to do things they can do in powerapps remember they both have all the same connectors so if you're just talking to a data source you're just sending an email you're just posting into a team's chat all of that can happen over here okay tip number three rename some of your controls there's a lot of advice out there on the internet that says hey you should rename all your controls like if we look over here you can see my app all of a sudden you know we've done nothing and I've got what a dozen controls the official guidance is you should rename all those I'm naturally lazy I don't have time to rename all those controls so here's my advice to you ioa rename controls that I'm going to use somewhere else so for example say that here with our little Sun email button we want to have a text input where they could write their own subject right so we go here we'd insert a text input and then we'd create all the default text and so then now we could go here to button two and say hey subject right it's just text we're going to say text input one dot text and then maybe what we're going to do is we'll insert a label above that and we'll say subject in this scenario I'm looking at this I'm like well what is text input one so I would have to go over here and figure it out and what if we kind of duplicated this whole thing let's just copy copy and paste I did control C and Ctrl V and then we're just going to change this to say body and so now this is text input one underscore one right so then you go here to body and you'd be like hey this is text input 1 underscore one dot texts so that would send an email whoever's in those fields that is not super intuitive so in this particular scenario if we're looking at looking at screen two I would not rename my label I'd go here and say Hey you you're going to be and I can double click here to rename it right so input body and then we'll go here text input one and maybe this time we'll use the ellipses and say rename and we're going to say input subject now look at it for formula so one powerapps is great power apps automatically rename the references so I didn't have to rename in the formula but see how much easier this is to figure out so Office 365 Outlook send email to the logged in user's email cool subject comes from that text box body comes from that one when I rename things I only rename things that provide me an advantage typically it's going to be controls that I'm referencing somewhere else I have never in the history of mankind ever renamed a label right who cares does it matter to me if this is label one or label one underscore one no don't rename them if you have a reason it matters to you leave it in the comments because I'd love to hear it but you can rename them but I I just I'm not gonna rename all of them so that's my advice to you a little side tip on that one I would also say if you are going to rename things or no you are going to rename things but I want you to try to find consistency and patterns there's plenty of naming guides out there conventions I don't follow any one particular guide but I have a pattern for me right so all my variables start with VAR all my questions start with col all my inputs start with inp right so what I really want from you is not to follow any one pattern I want you to say hey I'm always going to do it I want you to follow your pattern make up your own set and do it that another little side tip when it comes to things like videos right so say for example that you went and watched the video on how to upload multiple files right that's what this one does it lets you drag and drop we can select multiple files we get cute pictures of Buddy now you know when you do this leave yourself hints right so if you use a video we have a code comment that says I'll use this video or if I use the blog post or use a piece of documentation remember like I could just go here to my upload button with all of its crazy complexity and I would just go to the top and I would just do two forward slashes and be like built using this video and then I would just throw in the URL of the video I don't have the URL handy right I'll put the URL or put the URL down description for you guys but you know leaving yourself notes like this like don't think about the documentation is something that you do in case you win the lottery or hit the bus depending on if you're a half glass or half full or half empty type of person but think about documentation is something that will help future you right if you're coming in six months from now you're trying to figure out how you built this and trying to troubleshoot it and you really didn't know what you did the first time you just copy some code off of a blog post it wouldn't be nice if you had a link to that blog post right here so another little tip for my power ass beginners number four it's about labels right so for my Powerhouse beginner one of the things I want to stress with you is you cannot use labels enough because labels give you a chance to expose things I we do support here powerapps 911 right we get them with people and do like a team chat and just help them fix their app and we never talk to them again right like we we have that support service available and so as part of that I can't tell you how often I'll be troubleshooting with someone and they're like and something's not working and I'll be like well what's in that variable they're like oh it's it's it says Bob right like it's it's no problem and but the whole logic depends on that variable having Bob stored in it and it turns out that something else in their app is triggering or not triggering and that variable is not getting sitting with Bob so I always always always tell people hey when you're troubleshooting we want to use labels right so I say we're gonna go here we had a quick text input and so then in that text input we're going to have ourselves a button and we're going to take whatever they put on text input and put it into a variable so we can do something like this we'd say set VAR dog name and then we're gonna have that be we know it's text input two dot text so I would rename this I'm not going to now because remember that whole noisy thing and so we do that and then we're going to have them go to another screen so do a new screen blank back over here and so we're gonna do a semicolon and then navigate to screen three so now if they go here and they type in buddy and they press this button it takes them to the screen but that variable is set and so here maybe we're going to do is we're going to insert a smiley face there's a smiley face and we're gonna say hey smiley face I want your color so if we go up here to its color and we're going to say if our dog name equals buddy then what do we want to do we want to do uh the color dot green if not we're going to do the color dot red now look it's red right now but we just set it to buddy right so in these type of scenarios if you're in the maker so if you're building the app right now what we could do is we go up here we'd select bar or dog name we can see the data type is text and we can see the name is Buddy notice capitalization difference so that's how we can troubleshoot it while we're in acre but if I'm trying to troubleshoot that one user that's having weirdness what I will do is I'll just do a label on the screen while I'm testing well I'm figuring these things out and put VAR dog name there so I can visualize what's going on visualizing your variables your controls your outputs the things that you're making decisions on this is the number one tip for troubleshooting labels labels labels and flow I use compose compose compose so then what might I do in this scenario what I might do is I'm like oh clearly I was looking for Capital so then I could find out that there is a function in powerapps called upper and that would take a string like VAR buddy and change it to all uppercase so now I'm not having to worry about whether they capitalize the b or not where they capitalize the whole thing so I could remove that from the scenario but the thing was is that this label is what hopefully helped me get there by being able to visualize what did it type in the other thing that you might find out like is that maybe there's some function on the screen that sets the variable to Blink when they get here so even though they're setting it over there maybe in reality you had a um on the screen on visible you somebody somewhere along the way wrote code that said set VAR dog name to Chewie right and so then now what happens so if we go over here if we type in buddy like we did and we'll hit play We press this button the variable is getting set to chewy clicking that button set it to buddy but when this became visible it got set to chewy these are the type of things that lay tables help you find out and then of course you've got the search over here where we could have just said well VAR dog name and this would show you all the places and this might help you figure out where that's getting mysteriously set okay labels labels labels okay so for number five let's go back over here so number five it's air messes you see up here in the top right the app Checker the stethoscope this thing should never have a red dot if it has a red dot that means you stop right now and you figure out what's going on don't build your app with errors because what can happen so I say we go here and we're messing around we don't know what we're really doing we're trying to troubleshoot something and I type in 12. I'm like hey I want to make VAR dog name 12. notice it goes red right away but I'm like yeah we go away from there but look now we got red here we go up here to the app checker that one little thing caused four errors in my app if you wait five minutes five hours five days before you try to figure it out like which one of these is the problem right is it the expected tax value is it the argument type is the function I don't know okay but if I know if as soon as the red thing showed up when we caused the error we know that we introduce the air here so we can go back we can hit the drop down here incompatible type we hit edit the formula bar and we realize that incompatible type says Hey basically you're using this as a text variable in some places but by typing 12 there you made it a number variable you can't have a variable be two things so if you really wanted to be 12 you could you know throw some double quotes around now it's the text one two and now look the error is gone because those other three errors were all just problems because you broke this variable they were things that depended on the variable imagine you tried to solve the wrong one of those right like you would have had to dig and dig and dig anytime like I literally just I can't physically build an app if the Red Dot is on it get yourself self-trained the same way your peripheral vision is always looking for that red dot if it shows up we fix that problem right away so we can go forward and solve small problems if you if you cause the error you can fix the error if you got a bunch of Errors you gotta fix them later it's a lot harder so as beginners just don't ever build if the red dots up here that means stop and figure out what you did wrong okay so bonus tip here and you kind of saw this as I was going through but I purposely didn't use some words that I wanted to because I wanted to use them here and that is powerapps just once what powerapps wants it doesn't care how you get there this is the most fundamental lesson that I can offer you I teach this in my beginning class I teach this my intermediate class I teach this in my advanced class because even as a pro we fall into traps of writing really complicated things because we get away from this idea that powerapps just Wants What It Wants right like so if you go here this is insert another label if we want to set the font size right so size is a number it's the number 13. the key is that the size property just wants a number it doesn't care how you get there so if you do 13 times 2 which is 26 fine right 13 times 2 minus three now it's 23 right it's being calculated but this output here spits out a number if we have it do um if we want to set the size to something completely different like count rows in employees right count row spits out a number it doesn't care so now the font size there's 17 rows so now the font size is 17. power apps just once what it wants it doesn't care how you do there if you said If Today equals and that's Christmas then make the font 50 if not be 20. it doesn't it doesn't care that we use the formula it doesn't matter this is the number one challenge that everyone has when it comes to powerapps right because if you highlight this whole thing it says I'm spitting down a number I've spent down 20. we know that size 1 to 20. so if I was setting color same thing if I'm setting the text if I'm trying to create a variable if I'm trying to do a patch statement powerapps just Wants What It Wants and as long as you give it what it wants you're going to be happy okay so that's my thing for today right so as powerapps beginners just remember don't overdo it right starting simple doing less Advanced things is totally okay you will get to the more advanced things so don't don't fret too much there also you know someone asked me the other day hey how do I get better at this thing faster you don't right you you need to get your 10 000 hours yes you can go take one of my training classes we got the free ones you got the paid ones we got the whole encompassing University they can all help you grow in a more structured way but the end of the day the main thing that I need you to do is to get your time in get in here build an app right I built apps for my kids soccer I build apps to track my food purchases I've built apps to take pictures of the dog all these things just got me more hours on the keyboard with power apps helping me learn little things because you know you build something and you're like Hey how do I do the next piece and then you go find the video or go find the blog post or go find the class that teaches you the thing that you don't know how to do so thoughts questions comments ways that I can help you right hit me up over at powerapps911.com with all that I'm gonna say thanks a great day

Channel: Shane Young

Views: 32,831

Keywords: Shane Young, powerapps911, PowerApps, Power Apps, Power Apps beginners, Power Apps tips, Microsoft Flow, Power Apps training, SharePoint, Power Apps forms, Power Apps controls, Office 365 Outlook, Power Apps tutorial, Power Apps 101, PowerApps911, Power Apps troubleshooting, Power Apps App Checker, Power Apps labels, Power Apps efficiency, Power Apps guide, Power Apps for beginners

Id: WZO2hgU8O4E

Length: 19min 17sec (1157 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2023