Power Apps

What if I told you that most of the variables in your Power Automate flows and Power Apps don’t need to be variables at all? In this post, we’ll explore immutable variables — a technique that can dramatically simplify your solutions, reduce API calls, and make your logic cleaner and easier to maintain. This post builds on concepts demonstrated in the accompanying video, where we go beyond the basics to show you practical applications, performance benefits, and best practices. ...

If you’ve heard of Microsoft’s Power Platform but aren’t sure exactly what it includes, this post gives you a clear overview of all five components. Power Platform is a collection of low-code, no-code tools created by Microsoft that allows users to automate business processes, create custom apps, build chatbots, visualise data, and publish web pages — spanning five main components: Power Automate, Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, Power BI, and Power Pages. ...

Want to learn Power Apps while having fun? Whether you’re building your first app or looking to get your child or class started with Power Apps, this is a great place to start learning by doing. I was challenged by my 9-year-old daughter, Emily, to build a Power App with her and create a YouTube video(s). This marks the first of a few articles demonstrating how to get started with a basic application that will teach you the basics of Power Apps. It is based on a simple data source, an Excel Spreadsheet. It will enable those with basic access to Power Apps, the ability to create the solution. In an ideal world, you would use a Microsoft List or, if licensed, a DataVerse Table(s). As my daughter will be building her solution on her Glow Scotland Education Tenant where she is licensed for Power Apps, she cannot create Teams (for Teams DataVerse or a Microsoft List) and I didn’t want to run the risk of building Custom Tables in the Glow Default Environment. If none of this makes sense, don’t worry as I will try to drop the technical lingo going forward - any questions please ask. ...

Have you ever fancied your own trigger or action that you can call from Power Automate? This very same connector can be used in PowerApps too or you can build one specific for your Logic App. I am going to show you how I built a custom connector for the Graph API. The API call in question will allow me to post an attachment to Teams chat. This is currently not supported by the native Teams actions in Power Automate. I also have an article on how the flow is built here. ...

Power Apps isn’t just for business workflows — it can be a brilliant tool for teaching kids to build their own mobile apps. In this post, I’ll share how my son and I built a sign language spelling app in Power Apps, inspired by a fantastic presentation from the PowerApps 4 Kids team. The PowerApps 4 Kids Workshop My kids and I attended a presentation by Rory Neary and Pieter Veenstra of www.powerapps4kids.com where Pieter’s son Leo did a demo of his Planet PowerApp live on Zoom. Rory then went on to demo a 5-minute PowerApp that kids could build using sign language gifs available on their GitHub. The solution used a text input field that was then split across a Gallery using a dynamic reference to the animated gifs held on GitHub. ...