What is Power Apps?

hi this is lisa crosby and in this video i'm going to answer the question what is powerups powerapps is a really exciting technology that allows people who don't write code to create business applications there's a little more to it than that so stick with me and i'll take you through it it's actually three completely different things that you can do with power ups one of these gets a lot of attention and if you're looking at stuff around on the web on powerapps you'll probably find that one which is canvas apps but you can also create what are called model driven apps which is the ability to create a data model and a full web-based business application and you can also create a portal to reach out to your customers and allow them to interact with your data so let's go back to the first principles of this and the question what is powerapps is actually grammatically correct even though it sounds like it might not be powerapps is one of the parts of microsoft's power platform alongside power bi power automate and power virtual agents this suite of tools allows citizen developers people who don't write code who aren't traditional developers to solve their own business problems by building applications and we use the word applications in the broadest sense of the word because all of these pieces work together but let's focus here on this purple part on the powerapps part and what you can do with that so the idea is that you are someone who perhaps you know uses excel a lot to solve business problems you might be familiar with formulas and logic and things like that and this allows you to create your own application using no code in other words you can write formulas and expressions and use logic and a drag and drop point and click interface to create your own business application first thing that's really important to remember when you're looking at powerapps is that it is a business applications platform you can't use this to create a consumer app put it on that apple app store and and sell it or um or give it away to your customers or whatever it is first and foremost it's a business applications toolset and you are using it to create things for your organization for your business your own personal personal kind of use that's all good too but you need to be licensed and i've got a licensing video if you'd like more information about that you'll find the link here but what you need to remember is that every user who uses this needs to be licensed either through their office 365 license or with a powerapps premium license depending on what you're doing so if you're watching this thinking this is an application building toolset that you can use to make the next great game and put it on the app store no stop now if you're here for business applications you're in the right place so the three distinct things that you can do with power apps the first one is called canvas apps and it's called canvas apps because it allows you to start with a blank canvas so this is like a hybrid of powerpoint and excel basically you can drag and drop pieces onto the blank canvas you can design this down to the last pixel it's a pixel perfect design you can move the pieces around design the colors all of those things and you're actually building out your app with different screens and different design elements called components and then with formulas that determine the behavior of what's going on there and it's not exactly the same as excel if you are good with excel formulas certainly that gives you a good starting point but you know we'll start learning somewhere you don't have to have come from that place but that's about the level of technical knowledge that's needed to be able to succeed with this with a canvas app you choose your own data source you can choose from any one of it's up to about 400 different connectors now so you are building a canvas app referencing data on anything from you know an enterprise database system uh sharepoint list all sorts of different options there that you can get started with and you can also use this with dynamics 365 if you're using that as your crm or with the microsoft database which i will show you in the next part which is model driven apps model driven apps is the other kind of power app well there's there's a third one too but this is the other one that doesn't get quite as much love and the idea here it's called a model driven app because it allows you to build a data model with a canvas app you start with a blank canvas with a model driven app you start with a data model this is a relational data model you have a think about what kinds of data do i need to collect how do they relate to each other what are the different tables in my data what are the different columns that i want to have in my table and so on and then how do those tables relate to each other think of a model driven app as something comparable to a crm system or any kind of database system that you would purchase for for your organization but the beauty of the model driven app is that you're not buying an off-the-shelf pre-built application that somebody else has designed that doesn't quite work for you you know if you're working in a sales environment or customer service environment and so on there are awesome kind of crm systems out there for that but say you work in pet care or hairdressing or office supplies or office management bookings sporting goods what like whatever it is but you don't necessarily need like an opportunity pipeline or a customer service case management system and you really just want to be able to say well here is my particular data that i have for my business and the processes that i want to define for my business a model driven app allows you to do that and what you've got here is again low code this is a drag and drop interface that allows you to construct your tables construct all of the columns on those tables and the relationships between them and then the front-end user interface of that is already ready to go for you in terms of a responsive accessible performance interface and then what you do is you build out what are called forms and views that allow you to see and interact with your data in certain ways so you're defining where things go on the screen and unlike canvas apps which is a pixel perfect kind of design where you're starting with a blank canvas here because you've started with your blank model you are designing that front-end user interface in a component-driven kind of way how many columns do i want on the screen which parts of my data do i want to see where on the screen and you can drag and drop those things there to create that experience now these two things can come together you can actually bring a canvas app into a model driven app so where a canvas app is typically a mobile app you could also think of it as a widget like this for a model driven app so in this case what i'm showing you is a model driven app that has a canvas app embedded in it now remember our canvas app can reach out to and connect to any one of like 400 different data sources so the example here is a canvas app that is connected to twitter and now i can see contextually on my record inside my model driven app i'm having a look at a person and i want to see their twitter feed for instance it's able to dynamically draw that in so you can use canvas apps inside your model driven app in this way to bring in other types of data or you can use it just to jazz up the user interface a little bit because remember you canvas out pixel perfect design so you want to bring nice graphics and design elements and things in there you can do that and embed it as a as a widget inside your model driven app and third you can also create portals a portal is what you would use where you want to be able to have customers interacting with that data where you want customers to be able to log in and raise a ticket or get the status of a request or something like that this has to be built on the microsoft database so microsoft dataverse is where we've built that data model for a model driven app so these two things go together you can't use the portal functionality on sharepoint you can't use the portal functionality on kind of other external database systems the idea here is that you've built out that data model as we saw previously in the model driven app and then you are surfacing parts of that with the appropriate security and permissions to your customers or your members or your clients or whatever the use case is for those people to be able to log in read get updates submit information and so on should also mention with the model driven app that interface that user interface we saw before again only can be used with what you've built with your data model on microsoft database microsoft database used to be called the common data service so if you see that around that was a name change that happened november 2020 same thing there so there you go the three things you can do in answer to what is powerapps powerapps is a low code application development system people who are not traditional developers developers you can use it to build mobile applications connected to any data source you can use it to build out a full data model and an enterprise scale database with a responsive accessible user interface over the top and you can also use it to build a portal to access that data as well thanks for watching i hope that's been helpful please like this video if you've got something out of it and subscribe to my channel i've got heaps of videos here tutorials and tips on uh powerapps power virtual agents dynamics 365 and microsoft teams

Channel: Lisa Crosbie

Views: 10,987

Keywords: get started with power apps, learn powerapps, lisa crosbie, microsoft powerapps, power apps, power apps interview questions and answers, power apps learning for beginners, power platform, powerapps for beginners, powerapps for beginners youtube, powerapps tutorial, what is power apps

Id: uqYgq9wmgQg

Length: 9min 53sec (593 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2021