Learn Power Apps - Build and Configure your first Power App with SharePoint

today let's learn power apps so you're kind of the point where you're like hey I want to get to know this power apps thing I've heard about this low code no code solution I want to build my first app okay now there's different videos out there there's videos you're like hey just build an app like don't explain anything great what I'm going to try to do is walk you through how to build your first app but I'm going to show you just enough of the pieces to so you can start to dig in so we'll talk a little bit about formulas and customizing controls and the forums and the Galleries and just get all that kind of first level knowledge so you can actually start to build and cut customize these low Cod node tools I really learn power apps and then you can start to ask the questions about how to do more complex things as you encounter them I've done this video this will be my third pass of this um the first one was like in 2018 I did another one 2022 now it's 2024 it's time to do one but those other two videos have gotten over 500,000 views on my way to my 21 million so I feel like I have a good grounding here to kind of get you going with this not fun now let's just switch over to my desktop and take a look okay so to get started right we go to make. Power apps.com or if you're in a government tenant or things like that you might have to go to slightly different URL but for most of us it's make. power apps.com and we're presented with this home screen and so you could say hey I'm going to go use words right if you've got the co-pilot features you can type in here build me an app to manage my inventory it will walk you through that and build it it's a great experience but if you're trying to learn a little bit about power apps I don't feel like that's the best place to start okay so to start what I like to do is go over here and say start with an app template so here it's like hey I can build you a data centered mobile app based on your dataverse data your SharePoint your Excel or your SQL awesome because where most people want to start is from their SharePoint so we're going to click on from SharePoint and now what it's going to do is it's going to start creating a connection to SharePoint so if you don't already have a connection it's going to create a connection that's just its way of saying hey Shane's account can talk to SharePoint perfect and then once it does that over on the right it's going to then show us all my SharePoint sites so you go I probably took about 15 seconds so here you're going to see your most recent sites and you'll want to choose one of those and if we switch over to SharePoint real quick so we're going to use this one right just a good oldfashioned SharePoint list we call it doggy data it's got pictures of my dogs and some of the different ones that people work here at power apps 911 and a little bit of metadata about them that just kind of gives us fun sample data to use but you can pick any list you want and at the same time if you find a list you're really not sure how to get back to it just grab the URL right contrl C jump back over here and we can just paste that in right here and say connect and then look it says oh that is the site and then down here here I can scroll through and here's all the different ones and there's that doggy data list we did so we're going to click on that we'll move my face real quick and we will say create app now that create app experience usually takes anywhere from about 15 to 30 seconds and so I kind of cutle that out for you but now you can see it drops you into the power app studio so this is where you get to build your low code no apps right so as a power apps beginner this is the place that you want to be to do all the things the great thing about doing it the way we just did it though is it has built us a fully functional app so if you look over here on the top right you can click on the play button or the preview button right I still remember VCRs had that little control and here you can see that we've got the data right so this is the same SharePoint data so if we click on our dear friend buddy here we are then taken to more information about him so this is a form that is showing us all the information about his record his item his list item there so here's some different fields about it and if we say edit we can say you know what Buddy's actual uh collar color is not really orange he really is into purple lately we change that we hit the check mark and this is a live connection to SharePoint so as fast as we change that if we jump over here and do a refresh and so now we just scroll down the screen there's Buddy's record and look at that his favorite color is purple all right your power app is a live connection to your data source whether it's SharePoint dataverse Excel SQL Salesforce whatever your data is it's a live connection it's a real working app talking to your data it's not making a copy of it or anything like that so now we've done that we go back over here and we're kind of back okay well we hit the X though cuz that is kind of your first walkthr maybe you're watching that saying well Shane what if it didn't pull in the fields what if it wasn't showing what I wanted awesome that's why instead of just saying hey you got an app and calling the video done like some people do I want to kind of get in here with you a little bit the first thing we need to understand on this first screen if we look over on the left we got the tree View and if we click on browse Gallery one then we're going to see that this is a gallery this is a list of all the items in your table over there in SharePoint in this case and so with it selected over on the right in this property panel we can now start to change things like the layout so say you didn't have an image you could just change to one that didn't use an image boom we've changed we can go back we actually wanted the one with the image and so we have the ability to change that you also can change the fields so if we click on this you're going to see that for example that first field adaline that's the name of that puppy right there if we hit the little drop down here if we wanted to change that instead of being the first thing we want to see adeline's last name there's a last name field we click on that and now we see Boswell cuz that is Adeline Boswell but in our case we really want to see both first and last name there so what we're going to do in a minute is we're going to write a formula to do that but for the moment let's just leave it at first name like so okay so we could go through and change these like I don't want the ID here what I'm going to put here is uh the modeling wage right so all their dogs do modeling and so they can hourly rate of course uh for the image we're going to use the dog face and then for the body we're going to use a little bit more complicated we're going to do that collar one and the reason we're going to do the collar one is you're going to see in just a second we're going to see collar color very easy for me to say if you look it says display value down here so it's a little bit more different than the rest of them why because if you were to go look in our SharePoint list and then here go to list settings you're going to see that color color is a choice column so different columns in SharePoint or datae or SQL or whatever you're using right your different column types can cause different behaviors because it's going to change it depends on how the data is stored under the hood it's a little deeper than we really want to get into but Choice columns come up a lot so I want you to see that this case it is a choice column and so in that case it's going to be column name. we've done that now we know that we want to change this line here where it says addaline to be adaline Boswell so if you click on addaline this is going to look over on the left look it says Hey inside your browse Gallery 1 there's a control called title 3 this is a label it's a control for display information and then it says for the text see up here property we're using the formula this item. first name this item means the current record because when you're modifying a gallery you're only going to change the top row so in our case addaline and all the other rows are going to follow suit it just automatically happens so we need a way to make this reference not the single first name because we don't want them all to say adaline we want them to say that record or that item's uh first name okay so if we wanted to change this to last name I would go right here I'd start to type in last and notice Auto suggest says Hey last name is the name of column if we just hit the Tab Key boom now it says says this item last name and now it says Boswell right there right now in our case though we want this item first so I'm going type that remember power apps is case sensitive so you want to get used to using tab complete and so we got first name and then we're going to say amber sand to combine and then we type in that this item and then we do a DOT and we type in last and hit Tab and now we've got adaline Boswell but we don't have a space between the names yikes so we could go here and hit the space bar Bunch that's not going to do anything so the key here is that it's basically saying oh it's cute Shane doesn't know he's doing that's not unusual my wife says that all the time and uh we're just going to ignore all those extra spaces so what we're going to do here is we need to put in something so we want to add text so let's clear this out for a second so say CR a and contr X so if we want to have the text you know um Bob we could just do double quotes Bob like that and now they all say Bob because we've created the hardcoded string right that is the text Bo Bob for this particular label so they all say Bob down here in our case we want to do this but we wanted a space so what we're going to do is we're going to say amber sand and then we're going to do double quotes because that's how you do a string and then space and then double quotes and then another Amber sand so now it says do the first name and then combine or concatenate with that a space and then combine or concatenate with that the last name and now down here it says add a line space Boswell so that's how you build out your strings it's a lot like Excel so you've done before you know as a power app beginner like that's a real good foundation a lot of the things that happen in power apps happen the way that would be done in Excel as well so there's a very similar feel to this stuff and once again all these crazy Extra Spaces I would get rid of them in the real world but they don't matter because it's it says hey they don't you know they're just dead wasted space but if Shane wants them there we'll leave them there make him happy right Shane just goes sit on the couch now if we go down here so if we look at this one right so this is the modeling rate if we had play like you know so adelon gets 50 he gets 250 chewy gets 99 .99 but none of those look like currency even though over in SharePoint they are currency Fields they're just coming in as numbers so what we're going to do is we're going to use the text function the text function takes the text or in this case our number and we'll then apply a um format to it so we're going to say text and then do this and then this pattern right here and then we'll close our thing and now you can see that everyone has that so the way that that works is this is just like uh you're putting a number format in Excel like that's the exact same pattern you use in Excel but this is saying take the number modeling hourly rate turn it into text and do so apply this pattern where we've got a dollar sign and then we got optional numbers optional commas and then a zero here and then z0 what that says is if there is a number like in the case of chewy then show is 99 if there's not then show z0 and so that's why for Buddy and analine it bolted on a zero if any body made over $1,000 then they would see the commas in there as well and this will adapt to your different regions so if you're in a different region don't worry it's going to you know if you have spaces and all that the formula looks slightly different for you but it it would adapt so there's that one if we go down here so notice what this one it's this item color color. Val and remember that happened in a little drop down the reason this happened is because it's that choice colum and so in SharePoint Choice columns are stored differently and so this happened here right if you were typing it out what you would do is you do this you'd say color color it wouldn't work and it says this because you gave me a data type of record you gave me a whole row of information but I only want a field I don't know what all that means that's okay anytime this pops up hit a DOT look at that dot value so that's the only possible thing that can go here so we just hit Tab and then it fills out so as you're exploring like you're going to have to get better at what's the table where's a record versus a field but right now like just know that if you run into Choice columns are like that look up columns manage metadata there's several different SharePoint columns that come in like that so anytime you get stuck or getting that error message just try Dot and see if there's anything underneath it that's probably what you're looking for it's most always Dov value as well okay so one other thing I want you to know about this before we leave this screen there probably more than one thing but the next thing I want you to know how about that is you know power apps is a tool that it just Wants What It Wants It doesn't care how you get there so example say that you think well adline Boswell right that's a little too small I want to be a bigger font so we could jump over here to font size look with it selected it shows up over here and we could change this to 22 and now they're all bigger cool at the same time when we selected this we could have said over here look we got the title three selected remember we did the property drop down for text if you hit this this is all the properties for this particular control that you can set and for example there's a size property it has 22 everything in power apps just once at once it doesn't care how you get there like if you take one of my training classes like my two one class I must say that a 100 times over the course of the week and the reason I say that is because look size just want a number it doesn't care so if you wanted the size to be 22 + 4 right we know was 26 now they're 26 because power apps is evaluating this 22 plus 4 equal 26 and data type is number boom 26 is a number size wants a number it now shows you that number that's really important to remember as you start to do cooler things you start to say how do I make this my own how do I get this information a lot of times it's just thinking what does power apps want for example with this one what we could do is we could say you know what you want I want your size to be this item dot modeling hour rate and so now the sizes are crazy why because every one of them has a different modeling rate right two buddy and his 250 like that font is way too big to fit on the screen this would be a really dumb idea but I didn't say it was a good idea I just said hey look this is how we understand that size just wants a number it doesn't matter how you get to that so we'll put it back to 22 now they're all 22 so you could do the same type of thing you want to make this adjustable grab your gallery pull it up here I feel like I'm using PowerPoint now insert and so here we have a bunch of controls and under here we have an input and we have a slider the slider control allows you to take your finger or your mouse in this case and move the control so look if we set this at 12 okay we can go up here and we're going to click on addon and we say hey your size well we know there's a control named slider one right slider one. value remember it's almost always value is that and so right now it's 12 so the font size is 12 but power apps updates in real time so if you drag this out here what giant smaller smaller so you could make the font responsive once again you're probably not going to do so so I've had some accessibility customers actually do something very similar to this but the idea I want you to take away from this is not the silly demo I want you to take away from it this just wants a number right like when we were in the text field it just wanted text it didn't care if we hardcoded Bob if we used that this item thing if we wrote a formula to do it doesn't matter as long as the output of whatever you put there is the thing that it wants it's happy same type of deal with if we wanted to change U their favorite color down here right so what if we said well hey you've got a color property right yes you do and so right now it uses this fun which outputs black power apps has a whole bunch of built-in colors we could say like color dot medium aquam I don't know why I always use that one right that weird green color now they're all that weird green color but you could also have some type of formula here that says something like this item. color color. value now we know that's a color but it's not though right look it's telling me over here it's text so it's the text P in K we know that's the color pink but this is just getting text it wants a color not not text and if you hover it'll tell you want a color value so there's a function called color value color value takes the text P K and turns it into the color pink and now if you look everyone's favorite color is written in their favorite color because it just Wants What It Wants It doesn't care how you get there keep that in mind that's the key to power apps is these little type of tweaks driving what you want right so let's put them all back to black real quick and it's it's always color. black one other example of that so if you click on the gallery itself again one of the properties of a gallery is the template fill so template is that top row this is how you change the behavior of the rows right so template fill right now is set to transparent and so what you can do here is we could do something like an if we could say if this item. modeling alley rate is greater than 100 so anyone that makes more than 100 we want to do them in color. green and if not we want to do them in color do orange probably going to look really ugly if you watch enough of my videos and there's like 400 of them at this point if you watch enough of them you'll find out that I'm really good at making ugly apps I'm good at teaching stuff everything except how to make pretty stuff so sh you'll get over here but look now we've did conditional formatting so all these rows for all these dogs that make less than 100 are orange but buddy who makes 250 is green lot of really cool stuff you can do there once you accept power apps you know just Wants What It Wants It doesn't care if you're using formulas or not so we'll set these all back to color. transparent you want to know a secret color. transparent wasn't there back in 2018 when I made this they made the color just for me the product team and I work together and they made transparent it's my color I know it's kind of kind of like me right it's clear and void of any interest whatever okay so now we know if we hit play like we've customize this we've made it our own now we know like if we click on this it takes us over here how does does that work okay so another thing to keep in mind with power apps is there is nothing there's no magic right everything in power apps is right in front of there's no compil code you can figure out how everything works so if we go and click on this Arrow we'd see that it has a on Select Property on select means when someone clicks this pushes a button touches this control with the mouse or finger or whatever this is what it does in this case it says I select so I click on my parent look at the tree who's next to Arrow's parent brows gallery one so if we go to browse Gallery 1 and find it's on select that does the function navigate detail screen one look at that the name of the that screen is detail screen one so by pressing this button right here Boop it takes us to detail screen one okay so the navigate is how it does that remember and this is why I put you into this app specifically if we want to be honest with each CH I wanted you a way to discover how in multiscreen app worked and connected and done and so this is how I learned if you back up to a million years ago when I was learning powerups there was no documentation this was how I learned I built this sample app and I clicked around it I'm like oh how does this button get me from this screen and I went and clawed through all the things until I figured out how it worked so I want to give you that same experience as you're trying to understand things use this sample app so that you're able to see how things connect because later on you're going to learn and build your own apps starting with a blank white screen and you got to do it all yourself and the more of this mechanic stuff where it's already done for you can go and reverse engineer the faster you're going to learn to do that so here on detail screen one we have a detail form so as a power apps beginner you're going to want to learn a lot about forms form controls are for showing a specific record Gallery showed us everything in the list now we've chosen a specific dog in this case buddy we want to see just Buddy's details that's where the form comes into play and a view form like this does just that it shows some of the fields we can't edit the data we can't work with the data we're really just seeing those if we click on the form so what if you when you do this you're like hey Shane I'm missing one of my fields or I don't want anybody to see um you know how much buddy weighs right that's can be embarrassing no big deal so we got the form selected over on the right now in the property panel we can click on fields so these are the fields that came in you want to get rid of weight just click right here and say remove weight's gone you want to add a field you want to pull in the field about uh the dog's email address then click on dog email here and add it in oh you need dog email underneath his last name click drag it up here right this interface is pretty intuitive once you get used to you know the idea of using it you can add Fields you can remove Fields you can change kind of some of the behaviors like there's a lot more you can learn about it but for right now I just want you to kind of see the data you can also come over here and start to play with like you want to change this to a two column layout no big deal right you want to change it to more of a horizontal layout and then may back to one column so it doesn't look as terrible now you've kind of got like the old InfoPath design you know there's a lot of this stuff there's so much for you to learn like I envy you all the cool things you're going to get to learn I'm not going to try to teach them all in one video I've probably already taught too much but I wanted you to kind of see how that goes okay so this screen not a lot to do but now that we've done that now we know that if we wanted to edit Buddy's color collar and put it back to uh orange again we would click this edit pencil how does this edit pencil work so go up here click on it look it also has an on Select Property almost every control in power apps has an on Select Property right what happens when someone clicks on them this one does two things this is the first time you've seen this see it says done run the function edit form so that puts a form into edit mode and do it to the form named edit form one that's the form on the next screen sh and simy says hey I'm done with that let me do something else so I have to go right here and hit enter I think this reads easier right so edit form that you're done cool now navigate to edit screen one so s are how you separate multiple functions on one button click like this now keep in mind if you are in a region of the world where you have a comma as a decimal separator instead of the period like we use here in the US then your syntax is going to be a little bit different everywhere that I use a comma in a formula you would use a semicolon everywhere that I use a semicolon like right there you would use two semicolons so I'll put a link to a video up there that'll help you understand that language a little bit better so this screen we got this one licked pretty fast we can say play and remember you can go investigate how does delete functionality work go check that out we're not going to do that together but I want there's a lot here you can still learn so we're going to say edit now this take took us to that edit screen one and look and then there was the form edit form one edit forms allow you to edit or create new records so here we can once again change the field so you want to get rid of weight again cool remove that add your field for uh doggy email right there and say add and then drag it up here right the edit form and The View form they work exactly the same as far as like the customization functionality so what you can do with the fields and stuff that there's some behavioral stuff you'll learn later but right now like the experience of changing what you're seeing there it's all the same what's really nice as well that like if you look like collar color so it was automatically a drop down and if we were to go over to SharePoint again remember collar color was a choice and so look red pink green purple orange and we go over here red pink green purple orange so power apps already took care of bridging that for you you know birthday is a a date column so it's already set it up as a date column is a good dog is a yes no or a true false column depending on how you look at it in SharePoint and so it's already set up for a control for that the rest of these are all regular text so power apps you know was really smart and kind of set this up for you this is the beauty of forms for a power apps beginner is that they did all this thinking for us even more beautiful look when we changed his favorite color from purple to Pink now when we go we got to click this button what does that button do if we look up here it just does the function submit form edit form one so the submit form button says Hey figure out what the form's got going on and then go save it back to the data source it's connected to like it figures all the logic out you don't have to understand anything it just knows what to do and based on whether the form is in edit mode which it is now or if it was in new mode it knows to edit an existing record or create a new record so cool that it just does all that for you okay so if we hit that Boop and now we're off to the races up here right there's more things to learn you know this changes the way this data source you can search the data uh this one creates new records like there's a lot more to unpack here but this video has already gotten to be longer than I wanted to but wait a minute in my quest to make sure the video wasn't too long I almost forgot probably what the most important thing is now you've built and customized this thing you probably want to do something with it right so up in the top right hand corner you need to save it so power apps will save the app for we got to give it a name we enter something there and then we're going to hit save so the reason the save is important is that you're building all this in the browser if at any point your browser crashed before you had um saved then you would lose everything but now that I've done a save power apps will auto save every two minutes going forward so you've got to do that first save I should have showed you to do that first save the moment we landed in here B on me but that's your reward for watching towards the end you get to see all the pieces but now that we've saved it then of course we probably want to share it as well and so what we're going to do is we're going to go here to share and so from this interface we're going to enter one of our co-workers so in my case winner chewy and then it's saying hey do you want to make him a co-owner or not nope I just want him to be able to use the app and then it's reminding me that remember this app is going to run as the user that is running the app so not use the person that built it but when we share it with Chewy when chewy opens the app it's going to use Chewy's credentials to connect to SharePoint so chewy needs access that SharePoint list so if chewy can't access that SharePoint list then the app doesn't circumvent that right power apps doesn't let you do anything you don't have permissions to do already so you will want to make sure that whoever you share it with you also give them permissions right and if you're at this point you should be just sharing it with your bestie so you can be hey did this work I'm kind of work through the challenges with them there's a lot more about sharing a lot more about security a lot more about Sav so much more to learn but we're not here to overwhelm you right we're just here to get you going and so you can start to learn so you can start to ask those harder questions right I really Envy you like I wish I could go back and relearn all this again because it was so much fun and there's so much to learn and I'm still learning new stuff all the time so enjoy the journey what I was really trying to do was Empower you right like this is enough for you to take your data and make your first app I can't tell you how many people this is what their first app looks like they just start tweaking this a little tweaking a little this little that eventually you say hey I want to start from scratch and building a more awesome robust app because the sky is the limit like we've seen apps it cost a million dollars a Bild that's how much time and effort and design went into them and we've seen apps like this that you can build in 5 minutes so you know power apps runs the gamut you don't outgrow it it is a wonderful platform I've been doing nothing but power apps for I what don't know s six 8 12 50 years I don't know long long time um yeah and speaking of that if there's anything we can ever do to help you uh we got power apps 911.com so if you go to training. powerapps 911.com over there there is a free getting started class that teaches you all the different things about power apps power automate flows uh there's some AI in there now all of those fun things it's a free class you just sign up with your email address we're not going to spam you to death we're not going to try to sell you anything none of that and then we've got more advanced training classes we've got a Power Platform University a six-month program that gets you make awesome at it uh we can do Consulting whether it's just fixing a simple problem for you for 30 minutes or if you need us to do you know that million-dollar project for you right we we run the Gambit there so reach out if we can do anything sounding fun I think it does so with that I'm going to say thanks and have a great day

Channel: Shane Young

Views: 12,744

Keywords: shane young, shane young powerapps, powerapps tutorial, power apps, learn powerapps, microsoft powerapps, powerapps tutorial for beginners, powerapps tutorial sharepoint, powerapps for beginners, learn power apps, power apps tutorial, canvas app, power app, intro to power apps, how to build your first app using powerapps, how to, office 365, power apps beginner shane young, power apps beginner 2023, 2024, powerapps gallery basics, power apps forms tutorial

Id: oQqWxRulCPM

Length: 26min 59sec (1619 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2024