Power Apps Canvas vs Model Driven vs Portals Explained

hey what's up everyone april dunham here in this video i wanted to go back to the basics and build off of my how to get started with powerapps video in that video i walked you through how to get a development environment set up for powerapps and get the right subscriptions but for this video i want to take it a step back and talk at a high level what power-ups is and explain the differences between the different types of power apps that you can create so this should be great for those brand new to powerapps looking to understand the platform as a whole and what it can do for you and how to choose which type of app when based on your scenario so we'll talk through all this coming up but first here's the intro [Music] so to start out i want to do a high level overview of what powerapps is for those that are just starting out powerapps is part of microsoft's power platform suite of tools this is a low code platform that's part of microsoft 365 and spans across microsoft 365 azure and dynamics and there are four main components to this power platform one is power bi which is a low code dashboard analytics and reporting tool one is powerapps which i'm talking with you all about today in this video which is a low code rapid application development tool then you have power automate which used to be known as flow so if you're familiar with microsoft flow power automate is the name for that and that's the workflow and business process automation piece of this suite of tools and then you have power virtual agents which is the newest piece of the tools and that allows you to build low code chat bots and when we talk about low code tools what we mean there are traditionally to build some kind of software or business process you would have to have a developer build that in some kind of programming language what low code tools are trying to do is bridge that gap and bring the ability to create applications and reports and workflows to people with point-and-click type interfaces rather than having to do a lot of heavy custom code so that's where the powerapps piece comes into play if you need to build a desktop or mobile or tablet application for your business you could do that with powerapps using the powerapps editor which allows you to drag and drop controls onto the screen and use excel like formulas to build out your logic layer and you can integrate that easily with things called connectors which allow you to connect to different services such as microsoft 365 sharepoint teams onedrive dynamics and then services outside of microsoft 365 which there are over 325 different connectors at this point which keeps growing every day of services that you can connect to you can also build your own custom connectors so that you can bring in data from other services so this could be data from your on-prem behind the firewall type scenarios it could be data from services that you have that you're using at your business that have like an api that you can call you can create custom connectors and call and pull data from that within your powerapps also without having to write any complex code so when we're talking about powerapps you need to understand the three main different types of powerapps that you can create one type is called a canvas app and if you watch some of my videos most of the videos that i'm showing i'm demoing canvas apps with these canvas apps they give you complete control over the user interface of the application that you're building so as the name implies it literally gives you a blank canvas you can drag and drop the controls and build out the application pixel to pixel just how you want it and you add in your data sources so you determine what data from where you want to use and consume within that application these canvas apps are typically internal tenant facing so they're typically intended to be applications that's your building to help your organization not necessarily an app that you would go and put on a website and share with customers to consume now that's not to say that you can't share with external users there are some capabilities where you can use azure b2c to share with a user in a different tenant but that requires some additional configuration and you have the whole licensing concept that you have to consider as well because powerapps does require some licensing so the users that are external would have to somehow carry over a license or you would have to license them up so typically when people are using powerapps canvas apps they're mostly using those within their internal organization the other type of app that we have is called a model driven app with these type of apps you don't have complete control over the ui like you would in a canvas app it gives you a standard template that you can only slightly tweak so the difference between this is you don't get a blank canvas you start with your data first these model driven apps are tied to something called the common data service which in layman terms is a data repository and solutions mechanism specifically for the power platform the model driven apps are built on top of this and use that common data service data so what you do instead is you tie it to that you say i want an application that uses data from the accounts and the contacts and the task entities and then it will build that app for you and an entity in the common data service is the same as a table in a sql database or a list in a sharepoint site just like canvas apps these model driven apps are typically internal tenant facing as well but you can share those out with external customers as long as you have the right licensing in the setup and then the final type of powerapp that we can create is called a powerapps portal so these portals are also tied to the common data service and would use and consume data from those common data service entities but the scope of this is intended to be more public facing so a portal is almost like a lightweight website that you can build that you can have anonymous users interact with and read write data back and forth between your common data service database now that we understand the three main types of power apps that we can create let's dive in and take a look at the difference visually and from the user experience between the three so to get to powerapps you can log into office365 and get to it from the shortcut or you can get to it directly by going to make.powerapps.com when you get there you'll be taken to this landing page and you'll see those three main options that align to the three types of power apps we just discussed let's take a look at the canvas app from blank option first so we can see what building a new canvas app looks like so an important thing to know about canvas apps when you're using them is they aren't responsive out of the box meaning if you build a canvas app it's not going to automatically change the proportions of it to be optimized exactly for a desktop tablet or mobile device that's not to say that these won't work on those devices they just won't be optimized for that so that's why when we go and create a new canvas app from blank you'll see an option there for formats and you'll see two options one for tablet and one for phone now we don't have one for desktop here because the tablet one covers both of those both if it's a tablet or a desktop optimized application so it's really important when you're thinking about building an application that you consider your audience and where and on what devices are going to be using this primarily and it's important because once you select one of these it's not really simple to change the device format after the fact it technically can be done and there are some videos out there and blog posts that show you workarounds that you can do but especially for a beginner it's not very easy so it's best to just start off knowing which device you're trying to target this application for let's start with a tablet scenario and just walk through exploring the interface for building a canvas-based application we'll just give our app a name select the format and click create and you'll see here why they call this a canvas app we have a blank canvas we have no controls on here we don't have any data source relationships so that's up to us to define and hopefully what you're seeing is this looks very similar to some of the other office programs particularly powerpoint that you might be used to using you have the ribbon up here you can go and you can insert shapes and labels and text inputs and all of that like you can in powerpoint so that's why i like to say when i describe powerapps to people it's like if powerpoint and excel had a baby and that would be powerapps so you get why i'm getting the powerpoint reference just by looking at the design editor experience but the excel reference is for how you actually implement the logic layer in your powerapps applications so the logic to do things like write data to your data source or format data and all of that is very similar to excel formulas in fact it's really based off of that so if you're an excel guru and familiar with formulas for concatenation lookup things like that those are the same type of formulas that we can utilize in powerapps to do the logic so just explore the interface here we can come in and we can add things like labels buttons and we have all kinds of inputs here so things you would expect like drop downs list boxes date pickers radio buttons and then some more advanced things like pin inputs so you can have electronic signatures and in the media section we see that we can upload images in here we can even have audio and video there's a barcode scanning functionality so it's really simple to kind of explore this insert tab to see the type of controls that we're able to add into our powerapps you have charts we can embed power bi tiles in here and icons as well so it's just a matter of finding the controls you want on here and then adding them in and dragging and dropping them into the position that they should be so that's just a high level overview of the canvas app maker experience so now let's contrast this and compare it to the experience of building a new model driven app so for model driven if from the powerapps home screen we select model driven app from blank you'll see we're taken to a screen that looks a bit different where we need to give our app a name and click done to take us to the edit screen and when we do you'll see the experience is vastly different so rather than having that blank canvas to drop controls onto and add different data sources into instead we have this interface where we're telling it what entities to map to so that it will build the interface for us so you see for example we have different properties to configure like a site map the dashboards business process flows which are just a workflow for model driven apps in the entity view here are the data sources from the common data service that you're going to be using and consuming in this app so if you wanted to add an additional entity in here you can select this entity option and it will list out all the entities and you can just click the check box next to it and that adds that here into the editor and you can see that each of these entities if you're not familiar with the common data service have their own different set of properties or things that you can configure so you can configure the forms for it so if you do come from a sharepoint background like myself you know that we have the new the edits in the view form we have those type of forms as well for the common data service entities we have views similar to like how we have those in sharepoint lists and libraries and then you also have charts and dashboards so really to configure a basic app where we can manage add new records and see the records that are in there for these three different entities all we had to do was drag the entities here on to this and we can save publish this and click play to run it so you see we have the account entity shown here so this is the view surfacing up of the list of items in here i have a new option so it has it's fully baked in the new form control for me i didn't have to do anything rather than point it to the entity and i can add in new information here and click save and then see that data here in the view for the entity so that's the thing with these model driven apps though it did a lot of the work for me but i don't have any control over the look of this really it's going to give me the standard template with the left navigation i can control what shows here the values and the groupings and all of that but i can't control really anything else so that is the limitation but with that limitation you're gaining responsiveness so as i said earlier with canvas apps you have to choose if you're optimizing it for tablet or phone with these model driven apps since the layout is really rigid they're responsive out of the box so if i were to pull this up on a phone or tablet or desktop it would respond accordingly and look correct and that leads us to the final type of app then that we want to look at and that's a portal so if we select portal from blank you see we need to give it a name and also an address since this is a website that needs to go and check and make sure that that url is available and then we'll just click create to provision this new powerapps portal and when it's done provisioning to see all the apps that you've created with powerapps you can go to the apps tab and you can filter and sort this by type so this is where you can determine is this a canvas app a model driven or a portal so i can see the new portal that i've created here i can put this in edit mode so i can see how the experience differs between the canvas model and this portal so again vastly different since this is a website basically that we're creating so with these portals you have pages and then you have different components so layouts so in a way kind of similar if you ever use wordpress or any other kind of website building tool you have some that similar functionality where you add your different pages to your website the different kinds of layouts that this is going to be a one two three column and then the components of that so you might have some text you might have a form a list of items maybe a nice dashboard or something like that you just add all of the components that you want in here into the different pages and build them out all right so i've walked through and shown you each of the three different types of power apps that you can create one other thing that i'll mention it's not really a fourth type but more of a different way that you can create a canvas app and that's with the sharepoint integration so another thing when you're building power apps if you're using it with sharepoint specifically that you can do is you can customize your sharepoint list or libraries with powerapps so for example i can go into my time off request sharepoint list and you'll see a power-ups button and you'll have an option for customized forms so what this is doing if you happen to come from a sharepoint background and i've used infopath in the past you know that we had the option to customize a sharepoint list form with infopath so this is replacing that but allowing you to customize it with powerapps so this is a canvas based application but tied directly to a sharepoint list form so to kind of summarize what we just learned here if you want to build a mobile or desktop based application or tablet app that you have complete control over the ui and you want to connect to various different data sources then a canvas app is the way to go if you want to connect to data from the common data service and have a out of the box responsive application and aren't too concerned with being able to control the ui and just need the ability to view data and add new items then model driven apps are the way to go and lastly if you need an external facing website that can connect to the common data service then a powerapps portal is your choice just some examples in case you haven't caught any of my other videos of ways that canvas apps can be designed so this is an example of a canvas app intended to be used on a mobile device so you can see just how much you can customize these canvas apps here and have complete control over that ui so this still comes up here on my desktop fine it's just really narrow because it's in portrait mode optimized for the phone and this is an example of a canvas app that has been optimized for a tablet or desktop so you can see it takes up much more of the screen real estate so hopefully you understand the differences between the three main types of power apps and how to create them and when and where you might use them if you found this helpful please like subscribe and share and i'll catch you in the next video

Channel: April Dunnam

Views: 62,519

Keywords: Power Apps Canvas vs Model Driven vs Portals Explained, powerapps types, model driven powerapps, powerapps tutorial, powerapps tutorial for beginners, power platform, common data service, powerapps model driven apps, canvas apps, model-driven apps, power apps portals, difference between canvas and model driven apps in powerapps, powerapps canvas app, powerapps canvas vs model, create a canvas app in powerapps from a sharepoint list, April Dunnam

Id: M_tvnAmHMZY

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020