(bright music ) - Ever had an idea for an app but have never written a line of code? Today, in the first show
of a new three-part series, I'll help you join the millions of people with zero coding experience
building Power Apps today to help automate everyday tasks. I'll break down exactly
what you need to know and the key steps to
building your first Power App in under ten minutes, which if you are new to Power Apps, it's a part of Microsoft's Power Platform for building low code apps and processes. Your app can originate
from a task or process that you want to make easier
as you work with others, like a streamlined approval process, or maybe just an easier way to capture and track information on the go. And apps can run in the browser or on your favorite mobile platform. Today, I'll show you how to
build an inventory tracking app like this one for mechanical parts that anyone can use on the job for tracking and entering new parts. Even adding new AI-driven
Copilot capabilities so you can easily interact with your app and its data using natural language. And so to build out our inventory app, I'm going show you how
to create it in two ways. First, using AI with Copilot as a fast way to get up and running, and second, completely from scratch, so that I can walk you
through the core concepts. So let's break this down. You'll start by navigating
to make.powerapps.com. And front and center is
the new Copilot option that lets you use AI to generate an app by describing what you want it to do. I'll type "track inventory for
mechanical parts" and hit go. And pretty quickly, it's built
the first part of the app. This is the Copilot experience, where I can chat with the AI on the right. And as you can see, it's already generated a
table central to my app, which makes sense since it's an inventory app and I need a way to capture data. We can see the columns that it generated are around
the theme of mechanical parts. There's the part ID, part
name, part type, part number, and the quantity, each with sample data to
help you quickly get started. And you can add or remove columns easily by chatting with Copilot. For example, I know it's
important to have a description for these fasteners, maybe to describe their
size or thread pitch, so I'll type "add a description field." And there's the new column in the table. And I can even ask Copilot
to add more rows of data. And because Copilot can
interpret the context, it can add more sample data. I can even ask Copilot to give
me additional suggestions, and it suggests a few more fields that would be common to an inventory app and whether I should
remove the Part ID column. I'll keep that though and also take the suggestion
to add a price column. Now that's looking good, and if I need to, I can
update this table later. So to move on to the next step, I'll just hit create to build our app. And in just a few moments, Copilot has generated an app for me, and I'm in the Power Apps Studio where I can customize
and edit my app further. I'll hit play to test out the app. As I click through the
part names on the left, the data on the right shows
the details for each item. This is a cool functioning app
built in just a few moments from a short description
and a few chat interactions. And if you don't see Copilot yet, it will be rolling out in
the next couple of months. So I started with Copilot, not just to show you how
AI removes the majority of the manual steps to get started but also to show the steps
it took to build the app. For example, the AI predicted that a core part of my inventory tracking
experience had to be data entry. Essentially, it created
a form with a table and suggested columns with
sample data in line with my theme of tracking inventory
for mechanical parts. And behind the scenes, it also built a place on the backend for me to store my data. We can leverage this thought process as we look at building an app from scratch for even more creative control. For that, I'm going to
choose to build an app from a blank canvas, and I have two main options here. If I want to start with data, I may want to choose a model-driven app where the UI is generated
directly from your backend data. In this case, I don't have data, but I do have an idea
of what I want to build. So I'm going to choose the canvas app, which is going to let me
visually create a tailored, custom experience. I'll choose that and give my
app a name, Inventory App, and keep the default tablet format. When I hit create, I land directly in the Power
Apps Studio like we saw before. This time, let me give you a
tour of what you can do here. On the left here is the tree
view, which is the default. That shows us the visual
hierarchy of our app. There's not a lot to see here yet, but as we build out the app, more items will start to appear. Apps can have multiple
screens of different formats. And as I add new screens, there are different layouts and templates. And it feels similar to the experience of adding a new slide in PowerPoint. The bar along the top has our
most common editing actions, such as Insert that lets us add different
controls such as labels, buttons, shapes, and more to our app. We'll be using a few of these,
so we'll come back to this. Next, we have the add data option, which I'll show you in a second, new screen, and the last three are for
changing the look and feel for your app. Now, we know we need to build a table, so I'll select add data. Now, one thing to point out
that we'll walk through later in the series is that you can bring in data from different sources using connectors, which is a no-code way of connecting to available
data sources for your app. In this case, we are just going to focus
on creating our table. We'll name it "Mechanical Inventory," and we can use the table
editor to build it. Every app needs data, and by default, we spin up a place for your
app to read and write data from called Dataverse. And if you are just getting started, it's best to stick with this default. So now, let's start creating our table. I'll add a column, quantity. Notice it asks what data type I need. For example, if this were a money field, I would choose currency. In this case, I know it's a
number and a whole number, so I'll choose that. There's no specific format I want, so I'll keep the default none. Behavior refers to whether
it's a simple behavior, which is a manually entered value, or if there's a calculation that happens. And required refers to whether
it is required or optional to fill out when you're
entering a new row. I'll just keep the
default optional and save. And we'll keep building this out, adding more columns,
similar to what Copilot did, and configure each different column with its different properties. Fast-forward in time and our
table has started to take form. And you can see, I've also started to manually
add some sample data. You can do this by typing
directly in the cells in the table. And when I go ahead and hit close, we'll see that the table
was added to our app. Next, let's focus on building
out the app experience. The insert menu lets me
add new things to my app. Just like we saw before with
the Copilot-generated app, we want a view on the
left with our parts listed and details for the
selected part on the right. I'll start with the left side and use what's called a vertical gallery. Think of a vertical gallery
as a pre-formatted list view that will let me quickly
select and move between items. It then asks me which data I want to add, which is easy in this case because I only have the Parts
Inventories table in my app, so I'll choose it. And I can rearrange the
location on the screen. I just need to select
it, then drag and drop. And on the right here are
the different properties for anything that I have
selected on the canvas. This gallery lets me easily
edit the layout and change it. I don't have pictures for
my inventory right now, so I'll choose something a little simpler, with just the title, subtitle, and body. In this case, the title
shows the part name, subtitle shows the time of update, and the body shows the description, which currently doesn't
have data filled in. Let's change the subtitle and body. I'll make the subtitle the
quantity of the parts in stock and the body our part number. Next, I'll go back to the insert menu and choose an edit form, which will let me see the data fields for each part in my app. In fact, once I place it on the canvas, you'll see that the edit form
wants to connect to data, so I'll do that on the right and in the data source property. I'll choose our Parts
Inventories table again. Once data is connected, I can edit the data fields
to add the ones I want that show additional
details about the parts in my inventory. I'll click on edit
fields and select a few. I'll choose Part ID, Part Number, Part Type, Price, and Quantity, then hit add. And I can change their
order here if I want by dragging and dropping
the tiles in this menu. Here I'll move the quantity field up. I can also do this by
selecting the ellipses menu and choosing move up or move down, so I'll move quantity up one more time. I've configured my fields now, and the next thing I want to
do is connect the items you see in the vertical gallery
with the fields you see on the right, so that if I click on
the bolt on the left, it will display details for the bolt on these fields on the right. Let me go back to the tree view and explain how this will work. Kind of like in Excel, where every cell has a name, the same is true for our app. You can see our edit form is called Form1 and our vertical gallery
is called Gallery1. To make our form and
gallery work together, I'll use this formula bar on the top, which should look familiar
if you've used Excel. It lets you use Power Fx formulas, the language of Power Apps, which is similar to Excel formulas. First, I'll click on my
edit form on the right. Then in the formula bar
on the property dropdown, I can see all the properties for my form. I'll choose the item property, which refers to the data
that shows in the form. Now here is where the magic happens. In the formula field, I want to reference our
gallery, named Gallery1, so I'll start to type that in, and it shows me Gallery1
in this dropdown list. I'll select it, then you'll see Gallery1
is highlighted green in the formula bar and there's also a green
outline around the gallery on my canvas. Now let's see what we can
do to reference our gallery. I'll type a dot after its name, which is the syntax used
to reference the properties in this case for our gallery. These are the property
options listed here. Since I want the details
of the part I select in the gallery to appear in
the edit form on the right, I'll use the selected option. And you'll see this when I try it out. I'll individually select a few parts, and you'll see the details for each selected part appear
automatically on the right. It works! Now I'll save my progress, and by the way, you should
hit save every once in a while and again when you've finished building or updating your app. And you're done! You've built your first Power App. In part two of our series, we'll look at adding more
customizations to our app, like uploading parts photos and logic to send an email as well as the basics around
publishing and sharing your app for others to use it. You can keep checking back to our aka.ms/PowerAppsAuthoring playlist for the next episodes in the series. Subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics
if you haven't already, and thanks for watching. (gentle music)
