Learning Microsoft Power Apps

Chapter 3. Getting Started with Power Apps

You learned about the evolution of Power Apps and its relationship with Microsoft Power Platform and Dataverse in the previous chapters. In this chapter, I’ll go into more depth about Power Apps.

Introduction to Power Apps

Power Apps is a cloud-based app development platform that was developed to empower software developers and make it easier for organizations to rapidly design and deploy enterprise-grade business applications. To accomplish this, Power Apps uses low-code, no-code software development techniques that empower not only professional developers but also citizen developers to create and design responsive business applications for the web, mobile devices, and tablets by dragging and dropping components and using various other methods that I will discuss in later on.

It’s important to know that model-driven apps and canvas apps are collectively referred to as Power Apps. Each type of app has its own features, benefits, and use cases. Using Power Apps, you can connect to the data that is stored in either Microsoft Dataverse or a variety of other online or on-premises external databases and services, such as SharePoint, Azure SQL, Oracle, Adobe, DocuSign, Microsoft Excel, and SQL Server. Depending on your needs, you can create Power Apps-based business applications from either ready-made templates offered by Microsoft or from scratch. Power Apps offers a wide range of functionality, including drag-and-drop controls and custom ...