Welcome to your Power Apps learning journey! We're excited to partner with you in this learning path! Let's start with a brief introduction. What is Power Apps?


Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, and connectors that lets you create custom business apps without coding. It provides a rapid development environment where you can build apps according to your business needs. With Power Apps, you can build professional solutions using AI-powered development, prebuilt templates, and connectors to hundreds of data sources and systems. You can solve countless business problems with Power Apps, whether it's finance, sales and marketing, human resources, operations, or frontline workers.


Power Apps can connect to data you're already using. It can provide you with a vehicle to interact with your data on any device that can connect to Power Apps. It works in web browsers and on mobile devices.


The best thing about Power Apps is that you don't need coding experience to begin using it. The interface in the Power Platform studio enables you to produce solutions that can transform your manual business processes to digital ones.








With Power Apps, you can:

• Build an app quickly by connecting with existing data.
• Connect to the cloud services and data sources that you're already using.
• Share your apps instantly so that coworkers can use them on their phones and tablets. nodejs

Start Power Apps


Notice a menu down the left-hand side of your screen, and a Copilot entry field in the top-center of the screen. Copilot provides a way to describe what you want your app to do in everyday language. However, using Copilot to develop your app produces an app built on Microsoft Dataverse, which is an add-on cost and isn't immediately included in most licensing. So, while Dataverse is a great feature, some of you want to use a data source that's available free of cost. To get started with building an app on any data source, you select the Create button from the left-hand menu. Power Apps gives you shortcuts to start your app from some of the most common data sources including SharePoint and Excel, both of which are included in your organizational Microsoft 365 Account. Dataverse and SQL are superior data sources with the ability to handle large amounts of data quickly. However, connecting them to your app adds extra costs.


There are links to instructional videos for the most common ways to start, and if you continue to scroll down the Create page you see templates that are available to use. Templates are a great way to see how an app can behave with data, however, you don't want to use any of these templates with your own data. As you look through the templates, notice that some of them are Model-driven apps. Model-driven apps are form-based apps and aren't covered in this learning module. If you decide to try an app, make sure that it's a Canvas app.


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Explore Microsoft Power Platform



The Power Platform provides organizations with the opportunity to empower their team members to build their own solutions through an intuitive low-code or no-code set of services. These services help simplify the process of building solutions. With Power Platform, solutions can be built in days or weeks, as opposed to months or years. Microsoft Power Platform is composed of four key products: Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Pages.

Microsoft Power Apps​

Power Apps provides a rapid low code development environment for building custom apps for business needs. It's a suite of apps development services with a scalable data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) and an ability to interact with cloud & on-premises data sources. Power Apps enables the creation of web and mobile applications that run on all devices.


People use mobile apps for every area of their lives, and business should be no exception. Most out-of-the-box solutions don't meet exact business needs or integrate well with other business programs. Power Apps eases users into app development with a simple interface, so that every business user or pro developer can build custom apps. Veeam

Microsoft Power Automate​

Power Automate lets users create automated workflows between applications and services. It helps automate repetitive business processes such as communication, data collections, and decision approvals. Don't waste important productive hours on drafting the same email for a weekly update or manually walking through approval processes, Power Automate can provide automation not only for the individual user, but also for enterprise-grade process automation. Its simple interface allows users with every technical competence (from beginners to seasoned developers) to automate work tasks.

Microsoft Power BI​

Power BI is a business analytics service that delivers insights for analyzing data. It can share those insights through data visualizations, which make up reports and dashboards to enable fast, informed decisions. Power BI scales across an organization and has built-in governance and security, to allow businesses to focus on using data more than managing it.
‎You can consider Power BI as the analysis and insights leg of The Power Platform. A Power BI dashboard could potentially replace a standing meeting to report on company metrics such as sales data, progress against goals, or employee performance.


Describe the business value of the Power Platform



Many organizations struggle with building solutions that help their users be successful. Not only do they struggle trying to modernize their systems, but they simply don't have the resources required to meet the ever-changing needs of businesses today. With demands for targeted applications at an all-time high and labor shortages, it isn't uncommon to see application demand up to five times what departments can realistically deliver.


This demand for applications and resources isn't the only challenge facing enterprises today. As the business climate changes, new factors are impacting businesses.


These impacts include:

• Changing workforce expectations: As millennials and Gen Z come to represent most of the workforce, organizations need to adapt to fit the way they work. They grew up in a world of tailored experiences and collaborating through social media. To best apply their abilities, organizations need to be able to deliver more custom, streamlined, and collaborative digital experiences.
• Increased costs for custom application development: Building custom applications is time consuming and expensive. Not only do you need to factor in the costs to initially custom develop an application, but you need to factor in the costs to maintain it.
• Need to become more agile: Historically, solutions can take months to build and roll out. Once deployed, it can take weeks to implement every minor change. We no longer have that luxury. Business strategies and needs change rapidly, so organizations need to be able to quickly build solutions based on those changing needs.
• Need to scale development efficiently: To meet ever changing needs, organizations need to change how they develop solutions. By responsibly enabling citizen developers (power users) as part of development processes, we can create hybrid development teams that empower the entire organization to grow.

The Power Platform makes it easy for organizations to address all the challenges mentioned. The combination of low code tools, along with the ability to use enterprise level application development tools, provides a collaborative solution. Citizen developers and professional developers can work together to build targeted solutions, based on needs of the people who use these applications every day.


For example, technicians in the field might encounter scenarios in which they need a mechanical part to execute a job. Ideally if that part is in inventory, they can easily request the part so they can continue to work. However, many times, there's a bottleneck in this process. Often, the technicians would need to first submit a request. This delay means to wait for the person in charge of the inventory to respond, only to find out later that the part isn't in stock.


This delay could be easily solved by building a dedicated app using Power Apps. By being able to check inventory levels while onsite, technicians don't have to spend time waiting to determine if the part is available. Not only can they see the inventory, but they can also easily request any part as needed. Since the technicians best understand what they need to complete the job at hand, they can use their first-hand knowledge to build out a prototype of the application using Power Apps. Technicians can choose the best user interface and overall experience. This process is something that the developer traditionally starts. However, by providing the technicians with the ability to create a functional app, they can easily get started with a working concept. Once the prototype is built, professional developers can then fill in any potential gaps that go beyond the technician’s technical ability. The professional developers can create the APIs that do the real-time checking of the company’s inventory system. The APIs can be easily added to Power Apps and Power Automate. This collaborative approach to creating solutions is often referred to as fusion development, allowing organizations to use the best resources for the required task.redhat


Explore connectors and Microsoft Dataverse



Typically, when organizations are building business solutions, how the solution works and performs can be impacted by several factors. Two of those areas are connecting to data sources and managing business data. Power Platform includes two tools, data connectors and Microsoft Dataverse that make these areas easier. Data connecters make it easy to connect to data across different services. Microsoft Dataverse is a business database that not only stores business data, but also includes other built-in features such as security and more.


Let’s take a moment and examine each of these elements a little more closely.

Connectors​

Creating solutions that span multiple services can create challenges. One of those challenges is ensuring that you can perform the necessary operations in all systems. You need to access the service with a valid account, but the account needs to perform the necessary actions across all services. Let’s look at the following document processing example.


A building management uses vendors to perform services at their buildings, such as cleaning properties after tenants leave and providing landscaping services at their properties. After the jobs are completed, vendors send invoices to the building management company. The building management company might want to automate processing invoices from vendors.


Currently the process is as follows:

• Invoices are received as email attachments. The management company uses Microsoft Exchange for processing emails.
• These attachments are downloaded and stored in Microsoft SharePoint.
• Each invoice is sent to a specific person for approval. Approval is made in Microsoft Teams.
• Once approved, the invoices are entered into the company’s ERP system. The management company uses Oracle.
• Once entered, a confirmation email with the invoice number must be sent back to the vendor.

Use Artificial Intelligence to increase productivity


Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how companies do business. AI provides organizations with important insights about their organization and streamlines how individuals do their work. Microsoft Copilot uses AI to help individuals communicate their needs using natural language with relevant assistance provided in return.


Copilot is used throughout the Microsoft Power Platform. With Copilot, tasks such as building applications are as simple as just describing what you need the application to do through multiple steps of conversation. Copilot not only helps designers, but it also helps end users be more productive. Users can use Copilot inside applications to help them locate and analyze data, and streamline how they perform daily tasks.


Let’s look at some of the ways Copilot helps organizations move forward.

Simplify app creation​

With Copilot, it's easy and efficient to build an application. There’s no need to manually build out every element, you just describe the app that you want to build, and AI designs it for you. You receive in-app guidance using natural language processing to help build the app that best meets your needs. oracle