Understanding PowerApps

PowerApps is an ever-growing part of the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem, where developers and business users alike are empowered to create apps. In the past, for this to be achieved with SharePoint, you would have to use products such as InfoPath, where you could combine custom logic with a number of visual components to extend the user experience:

PowerApps are created using visual tools that are provided through the browser and remove the dependency on needing additional applications to be installed on the desktop. However, this also builds into the Microsoft vision of mobility, where a user can work on their app anywhere in the world, at any time, from any device.

PowerApps aren't written with code; instead, they are created with formulas, similar to Microsoft Excel, a tool that the majority of the modern workforce are familiar with. For example, if we wanted to combine or concatenate strings in Excel, we would use the following formula:

If we compare this to doing the same within PowerApps, you will see the similarities between the two products:

With this familiar approach to building logic, you don't need to be a developer to start creating solutions to business problems. For developers, PowerApps can be enriched using custom-developed functionality that can be deployed to and called from Azure, meaning that PowerApps is a tool that everyone on the IT spectrum can take advantage of.

From personal experience, I find PowerApps to be an excellent prototyping tool. Due to the drag and drop nature of its design, I can quickly and easily place components on a screen to establish a basic look and feel for an app while also connecting to some of the more rudimentary data sources, such as an Excel spreadsheet or a SharePoint list.

Before we dive into how we create apps, we should explore PowerApps' licensing options, since their cost will be a huge influence on the design decisions you make when creating apps.