What is Power Apps?

1. What is Power Apps?

Welcome to Introduction to Power Apps! This course teaches you to build the business apps your team needs, without writing code from scratch.

2. Meet your instructor

This course was developed with Luise Freese, a Power Platform and Azure architect based in Düsseldorf and a two-time Microsoft MVP for M365 Development and Business Applications. She helps teams build accessible apps, robust data models, and automation that respects governance, compliance, and human effort. Her motto? "Changing the world one app at a time."

3. What you'll learn

By the end of this course, you'll be the person on your team who builds the small tool that solves a real problem, instead of waiting for IT. We'll go from getting oriented and shipping a first screen, to connecting real data, to adding navigation, forms, and validation, and finally to making the app responsive and publishing it.

4. Where this course takes you

You'll build an app like this: a list of records on one screen, a detail view when you tap one, and a form to add or edit. Your records live in a collection the app builds at startup, no licensed connector needed. Every piece of logic is written in Power Fx, the formula language Power Apps uses; it looks like an Excel formula bar, not traditional code.

5. Meet the Power Platform

Power Apps belongs to the Microsoft Power Platform, a family of five tools that share data, security, and a consistent maker experience. Alongside Power Apps you'll find Power Automate for automated workflows, Power BI for dashboards and reports, Power Pages for external websites and portals, and Copilot Studio for AI agents and chatbots. You don't need the siblings now, but anything you build here can talk to them.

6. Canvas apps

Power Apps comes in two flavors, each suited to a different kind of problem. Canvas apps are what we'll build in this course. You design the screen yourself, pixel by pixel, deciding where each control goes and what happens when someone taps it. They shine for single-purpose tools, a sign-in kiosk or a field inspector's form, and connect to many data sources, from Excel to SharePoint.

7. Model-driven apps

Model-driven apps are the other flavor. Instead of you designing each screen, Power Apps generates them from your data tables. Your records turn into a standardized list, form, and view, ideal for CRM systems, service desks, or case management. This course focuses on canvas apps; though we'll revisit model-driven apps in Chapter 4.

8. Modern controls and themes

Power Apps ships two generations of controls. Classic controls are the older set, and canvas apps have long relied on them. Modern controls are the newer set, built on Microsoft's Fluent 2 design system, and they come paired with modern themes. A theme sets color, typography, borders, and shadows across every screen at once, so you style a whole app in one step rather than one control at a time. This course uses modern controls throughout, and since they're off by default, the next video covers switching them on.

9. Why Power Apps?

It's a low-code platform: you build screens by dragging controls, and you write the logic in Excel-style formulas. That means the people who actually understand the work can ship their own apps without waiting on an IT backlog. Power Apps is included with most Microsoft 365 plans, so you likely already have access.

10. Where new apps start

Everything in the maker portal starts from the left navigation, and new apps start from the Create entry. If your window is narrow, the navigation collapses to icons, so Create shows as just a plus sign. Either way, it opens the Create an app page.

11. Let's practice!

Time to put canvas apps and model-driven apps to the test, and tell them apart for some real scenarios.

Create Your Free Account

By continuing, you accept our Terms of Use, our Privacy Policy and that your data is stored in the USA.