Master 365: Getting Started with Power Apps (Premium)

Power Apps is Microsoft’s “low-code/no-code” platform, but I had incorrectly assumed that it was more “low-code” than “no-code.” But based on my first experiences using this platform, I can already see that it’s possible to build sophisticated apps with literally no code. And that is blowing my mind.

Note: Power Apps requires a Microsoft 365 commercial or education account.

As a bit of background, I wrote about my early experience using Xamarin.Forms to create a simple cocktails app about a month ago. This seemed like a logical enough next step given my previous experience using Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and then the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to create different versions of .NETpad, my Notepad clone. But Xamarin.Forms is not ideal, to put it mildly, and its successor, called .NET MAUI, is still 18 months from a public release. So I’ve been looking at alternatives.

Flutter is one obvious choice, and I’ve been taking a free online class to learn this environment, and am excited by its power and versatility. A web app is another approach, and I’ve been investigating which framework(s) might make the most sense; possibly React, Electron, or React Native.

But in preparation for the final episode of the Microsoft 365 Knowledge Series, a podcast series I’ve been recording with Stephen Rose since January, I decided it would be fun to try and recreate my cocktails app—which I’d not completed in any meaningful way yet—using Power Apps. And I am blown away by how easy it was. In fact, I immediately blew by the functionality I had previously created using Xamarin.Forms and hundreds and hundreds of lines of code. The Power Apps version is literally no-code.

Here’s how it went.

The first step was to create some kind of a data source in which I would store the cocktails, each of which has a name, a description, a set of ingredients, and series of steps, and a photo. Power Apps supports all kinds of data sources, from an Excel spreadsheet to a SQL Server database, but one data source, in particular, stood out to me: A SharePoint list. In creating the cocktails app on mobile, I always intended to eventually use some kind of database, but I was using a simple C# list for the early versions. So a SharePoint list seemed like the logical choice.

To make the list, I signed-in to the Microsoft 365 portal with my Microsoft 365 Business Standard account and chose Sharepoint from the app launcher. In SharePoint Online, I created a new site called Cocktails. Then, I create a new list, which I imaginatively named Cocktails list.

Then, I populated the list with my five starter cocktails so I’d have some data to work from.

You can actually kick off a new Power App right from the SharePoint list: There’s a Power Apps menu with a Create an app menu item right there. But the more typical way to do this is from the Power Apps website so I headed over there instead. Here, I again signed in with my commercial Microsoft 365 account and then I selected New > SharePoint > Phone layout since my goal is a smartphone app.

After connecting to my SharePoint site and selecting the Cocktails list, Power Apps presented me with my starter app.

This is, surprisingly, quite complete as-is. Like the mobile app I labored over with Xamarin.Forms, this is a three-page app with a cocktail list page, a details screen that displays an individual cocktail, and an Edit screen that lets me edit a cocktail. But it goes beyond what I created previously by providing search and list sorting functionality, two features I always intended to add.

To test the app, you just hit the little Run (triangle) icon. The app appears in the browser window, allowing you to use it normally. For example, when you select a cocktail in the list, the details page for that cocktail appears.

This app works as-is, but I spent a few minutes configuring the font styles here and there and removing some extraneous information from the main list page just to clean things up.

After that, it was a simple matter of configuring the app name, icon, and description in Settings, and saving it to Power Apps.

To run the app on a smartphone, you need to install the Power Apps app and sign-in with a commercial Microsoft 365 account. The app appears in the list of available Power Apps, and you can of course pin it to your home screen as well.

It’s not perfect. On my Huawei P30 Pro, the app doesn’t fill the whole screen for some reason, though I suspect I could fix that easily enough. And I will probably spend at least a few more minutes tweaking the fonts. But this amount of functionality, with literally no code, is amazing.

I mean, think about what’s here. The list, of course. The ability to search and filter the list. The ability to display a cocktail, edit a cocktail, delete a cocktail, and add a new cocktail. No code.

Amazing.