Introduction to Power Apps
Power Apps is suite of applications, services and connections but also a data platform that allows you to build business applications. Using Power Apps we can quickly build an app, that connects to business data from various sources like SharePoint, SQL Server, Excel, etc.
Applications built using Power Apps allow to fully automate processes and data flows. It makes end-user experience simpler and makes building applications easier without coding experience. Power Apps also supports developer platform who can process business data and also integrate external data as well.
With Powe Apps you can:
- Build application without coding;
- Connect to cloud services;
- Share apps within organizations (also for mobile device users).
What are example possibilities of using Power Apps in business?
One of typical scenarios can be using Power Apps to deliver an application for sales team, who can easily support clients in stock management, but also make purchases directly using phone or tablet. Another common use of Power Apps is building time management tools for employees but also their supervisors who plan shift work for entire team.
What is included in Power Apps package?
As mentioned in the beginning Power Apps is set of services and applications that work together which facilitates our data processing and allows to update them from every device. Power Apps include:
- Power Apps main page where you can design your applications;
- Power Apps mobile, where we can run applications on different systems (Microsoft, iOS, Android);
- Power Apps Admin Center, where we can manage our applications and their components.
Power Apps main page allows building apps from examples, templates, but also personalized apps that we can build from scratch. All applications that we built or were shared with us will be visible over there.
Power Apps Studio
Power Apps Studio is panel where we can build our applications and it consists of 3 main canvas:
- Left panel showing hierarchical view of all controlls visible on each screen of our application;
- Middle panel showing design view of application we are currently working on;
- Right panel containing properites of controls, data sources, and formatting.
Source: microsoft.com
Power Apps Mobile
Power Apps Mobile allows running applications on mobile devices. It is available to download in app stores for selected systems. After installing it all you need is to log in to your organizational account where user will have access to all self-developed and shared applications.
Power Platform Admin Center
Admin Center is centralized place to manage applications in your organization. On this page we can define and manage application environments. Example of environment can be development, test and production ones. Additionally we can define types of data connections and manage roles in environments.
Summary
In this article I described what is Power Apps and what it consists of. In future articles I will describe work with Power Apps and share some practical tips and examples of use in business.