Data sources and connectors

1. Data sources and connectors

Your app has a screen, a button, and a label. But every app you'll actually ship needs data, the records people look at, filter, and edit. The next step is to connect your app to a real data source, so let's look at how that works.

2. The words everyone mixes up

Before we touch anything, let's untangle four words people mix up. A connector is the bridge between Power Apps and a service like SharePoint or Excel. A connection is your specific sign-in over that bridge. A data source is the actual table the app points at, like a single SharePoint list. And an environment is the wider space your app and its data sit in. We'll meet each properly through the chapter.

3. Standard vs premium

Power Apps ships with hundreds of connectors split into two tiers. Standard connectors come with most Microsoft 365 plans, SharePoint, Excel, OneDrive, Outlook, and Teams. Premium connectors need an add-on license and cover things like SQL Server, Salesforce, and Dataverse. Everything in this course uses Standard connectors, so you don't need an extra license to follow along.

4. A tasks list for Lumen Coffee

The dataset for this chapter comes from Lumen Coffee's marketing team, a tasks list with five columns: Title, Status, Priority, AssignedTo, and DueDate. It's the same shape you'd see in any team tracker at work. That's the data we'll bind to a gallery, filter, and search across the rest of the chapter.

5. Excel

For your first hands-on contact with data, we'll use the fastest path into the studio, Start with data, Upload Excel file. You hand it a spreadsheet, Power Apps reads the columns and builds a starter app around them, a gallery, a detail screen, a form, all wired up. Excel is a learning shortcut here, not how you'd actually ship a real app. The real path is SharePoint, which we'll switch to in the next video.

6. What happens on first upload

The first time you upload, Power Apps spends about fifty seconds creating a free developer environment for you. This is a one-time setup, every later upload reuses it. A welcome dialog pops up once on first entry; dismiss it before doing anything else. When the spinner clears, your app opens with the Excel data already wired to a starter gallery, ready to customize.

7. The data panel

Once your data is in the app, the Data panel becomes your home base. Find it in the left rail, it shows every table your app currently connects to. Click a table to inspect its columns, change which ones are wired to controls, or remove the connection if you don't need it any more. We'll come back here in every chapter to add and inspect data sources.

8. Gallery: how Power Apps shows lists

The control that displays a list of records is called a gallery. Point its Items property at your data source and Power Apps shows every row. We'll go deep on galleries in the next video; for now, just know they're how your data becomes visible.

9. What you'll build

In the exercises you'll connect your app to a dataset, inspect what Power Apps has connected in the Data panel, and drop a gallery onto the screen bound to that data.

10. Let's practice!

Time to get your first dataset into Power Apps.

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