what is powerapps

What Is PowerApps And How You Can Use It For Your Business?

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PowerApps is a Microsoft product, and its public preview was launched in April 2016. Over the years, Microsoft has improved the tool in such a way that any business can make the most of it. At present, if you are thinking, ‘what is PowerApps?’, the simple answer to this is ‘an app development tool.’

However, there is much more to this app development tool that Microsoft offers. You can leverage PowerApps features and functionalities to build powerful internal applications, and automate and simplify processes and services. Let’s dive into more details.

What is PowerApps?

what is powerapps

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PowerApps is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that allows one to create apps for Windows, Android, and iOS, along with web applications. The templates and drag-drop functionality can help non-developers to create useful custom apps for their business. Azure Cloud is used to build the capabilities of PowerApps.

You can transform the manual business work to automation without more coding by using the apps created by PowerApps. Running a single app on multiple platforms is taken care of by the PowerApps platform by handling the requirements of the underlying operating system. All you need to do is create an app, and the rest all is handled.

How Can You Make the Most Out Of PowerApps?

Why are more businesses relying on PowerApps to build applications? This is a question on the mind of every person looking for business tools. PowerApps offers a range of features that can help businesses increase productivity, Return on Investment (ROI) and decrease app development costs, time, and efforts.

Here’s how you can make the best of the PowerApps platform for your business.

1. Easily Integrate Microsoft and Third-party Applications

You can easily connect to Microsoft services like Office 365 Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, Excel, and much more. The PowerApps also supports third-party connectors like Google Calendar, Google Drive, Dropbox, Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP.

2. Leverage Common Data Service (CDS)

The Common Data Service (CDS) can help you access, manage, and store data from different sources of business applications. CDS stores the data in the entity format and in a secured way. You can control the access to the database by setting permissions and levels based on your business workflow.

3. Cost and Time Effective Development

When it comes to app development, all businesses think of lots of time and cost involved. However, with PowerApps, you can save both of them. You can make a single app at 10 USD with the help of this app development tool.

The ready-made templates, no coding, and drag-drop can help non-tech users develop applications. It is also perfect for businesses who don’t have a development team on board but wish to automate parts of their business through apps.

4. Make Canvas and Model-Driven Applications

The Canvas apps are simple and use case-specific. They are created using a no-code interface and drag and drop functionality offered by PowerApps to carry out specific tasks like submitting a report or creating a record. You can integrate it to Microsoft and non-Microsoft services.

The Model-Driven apps are a bit complex and are built using Dynamics 365 framework. You can carry out more multiple tasks using this kind of application. In this type of application, you can only connect to CDS for the data source.

5. Easily Share Created Applications

Sharing the created apps among the coworkers is very easy with PowerApps.

All the above points can help you make the most of the PowerApps for your businesses. You can build apps without compromising with the help of this powerful tool provided by Microsoft. And if you are already a developer, you can add more value to your application by enhancing it using PowerApps.

Pros and Cons of PowerApps

There are some pros and cons of PowerApps experienced by a range of users while using it for app development.

Pros

  • Integration with PowerBI and Flow makes it easy to analyze, act, and automate the business process
  • Data can be connected with a variety of data sources
  • Can be integrated with most of Microsoft services as well as some third-party applications
  • Clutterless user interface
  • Does not require coding knowledge to build apps
  • Model driver PowerApps can be implemented quickly with the help of pre-packed forms and views
  • Makes it easy to automate business processes, especially the areas like accounting and sales

Cons

  • The learning curve for users from non-technical backgrounds
  • Makes it difficult to share applications outside the business
  • Cannot publish applications on any stores; Apple, Play Store, and Microsoft Store
  • Cannot create applications for consumer consumptions
  • Limited opportunities to edit code, which can be an issue for more advanced users

Why Should You Use PowerApps?

With all the above features, you will be already interested in using PowerApps to design apps for your business automation. However, there is one more reason that makes it necessary to use PowerApps – using PowerApps with SharePoint.

The InfoPath forms services in SharePoint will be discontinued after April 2023. You will have to use PowerApps instead of InfoPath, post that to work with SharePoint. Also, there are no updates to InfoPath after the 2013 version release, so you have to use whatever features currently available. With PowerApps, you get a new product which Microsoft is pushing to its audience.

You can expect evolving features and bug-fixes with each new version. This makes PowerApps the right tool to adopt when it comes to web and mobile app development for multiple platforms and browsers.

Conclusion

PowerApps itself is quite powerful, and it also works well with other tools from Microsoft. With the integration of PowerBI, Flow, and cloud-based services like Azure and Dropbox, you can easily get more work done via the app created by PowerApps.

Now that you know what is PowerApps and how it can help you in your business to increase overall productivity, let’s look at some stats.

When apps are created using PowerApps, as per Microsoft, there is 188% ROI over three years and 74% reduction in app development cost. These are excellent numbers for businesses of any size, and a reason why you should consider using PowerApps.

3 Easy To Implement Tips That’ll Improve Your Power Apps Development Speed

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In this article, we’re going to explain three simple tips to improve your Power Apps development speed. Power Apps is actually a great tool for implementing applications across your organization. There are a couple of different types of users who will use Power Apps.  And they are ultimately going to care about either speed or the quality of the applications that are being built.

On one hand, you have the citizen developer who is probably developing something that is in support of their 9 to 5 job, but they’re not really in a development role with their company. They’re just making a process better or automating something for their team. And ultimately, they need to get back to their day job. So speed is important to them.

The other set of users are maybe your I.T. department or your marketing team. The would ultimately care about brand consistency and the user experience for the employees.

And so those are the two main groups that Microsoft Power Apps focus on.

These three pointers we have shared can be used to speed up power apps development, reduce frustration for a newbie developer, and ultimately create a more consistent and better user experience for advanced app development by an organization.

How To Improve Power Apps Development Speed

#1 Making use of Components

First, we will look at leveraging components to speed up the development of your power apps as well as to create consistency within your application and across your company. If you’ve used power apps before, you’ve probably gotten into the situation where you need to create the same control multiple times and have it look the same. And so to do that, you may have used the good old copy-paste method or maybe you’ve even created a separate screen or a library of controls, if you will, to copy-paste from within your application.

But if you’re using this technique to implement a header or footer, let’s say, in your application and your copy-pasting that header across all of the screens in your application, there is a better way. And that’s the component.

So you can actually leverage the component to build your header and it becomes your own control that you can then repeat within your application. And once you’ve actually put that header in all of the screens in your application, the really great thing about that is you can go back into the component itself and make an additional change, like adding secondary text or even changing the application name.

And that modification will actually take place in all of your screens where that header component is being used.

#2 Applying Global Styles with Power Apps

In the second tip to improve Power Apps development speed, we want to look at applying global styles within the power apps application. So now that we’re using a component for our header, we want to figure out how to apply the change in color or theme. If that should need to take place for application. So one of the ways that we can apply this is we can actually do this through the OnStart function, where we can define things like primary text color, secondary text color, fill color, background, color, and things like that.

But there is one hurdle to overcome with components, and that is unlike controls where all of these properties are readily available to us and we can apply from variables that we set an app on start. We don’t have the same luxury with components, but what we do have for components is something called parameters. And so the key thing really in defining branding or global styles for our components is defining what are the things that we want to impact. So maybe it’s as simple as primary text color and fills color or primary text color and secondary text color.

And so we would simply define those things, for example, as parameters linking them to our variables and our app on start to then apply those changes across all of our components within the application. In addition to any other controls that are referencing variables in-app OnStart.

#3 Using Component Libraries

In our third tip today, we want to talk about using component libraries to improve power apps development speed. So now that you have a component, your first component built. We want to be able to expose that component or publish it for other power apps developers within the organization.

This will help speed up their development as well as to improve consistency overall in the applications deployed within your organization.

In order to do this, we mention the recommended approach, and that is to use component libraries. And so in addition to, you know, not only speeding up development and providing power apps developers with access to rich resources or components that have already been developed for them in a consistent way.

There are additional benefits to component libraries, some of which are things like versioning and allowing users, power apps developers to be notified when an update is made to a particular component so that they can appropriately deal with any of those changes within the applications that they’ve developed.

We’re going to be digging deeper into each of these topics in the future.

In the meantime, if you have any questions about power apps development speed, feel free to comment below and we will answer it for you.