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. She came into tech from brand strategy six years ago, so she approaches apps the way she used to approach brands, asking who's the user and how do we get out of their way? She's a two-time Microsoft MVP across M365 Development and Business Applications.

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. Chapter 1 gets you oriented and shipping a first screen. Chapter 2 connects your app to data and shows it in a gallery. Chapter 3 adds navigation, forms, and validation, turning a static screen into a real workflow. Chapter 4 makes the app responsive, publishes it, and shares it with your team.

4. Where this course takes you

Here's where you're headed. Over the course 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. It's bound to a real data source, so when you save in the app, the data updates live. Every piece of logic is written in Power Fx, the formula language Power Apps uses. It looks a lot like an Excel formula bar, which is exactly the point.

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. Power Apps, the focus of this course, builds custom business apps. Power Automate runs automated workflows triggered by events or schedules. Power BI turns data into dashboards and reports. Power Pages builds external websites and portals. And Copilot Studio creates custom AI agents and chatbots. You don't need to learn the siblings now, just know they exist alongside Power Apps and that anything you build here can talk to them.

6. Canvas apps

Power Apps comes in two flavors, and each one suits a different kind of problem. Canvas apps are the kind we'll build in this course. You design the screen yourself, pixel by pixel, choosing where the button goes, what color it is, and what happens when someone taps it. They shine for single-purpose tools, a visitor sign-in screen, a field inspector's form, a quick logging app. And they connect to many data sources, from a simple Excel file to a full SharePoint list.

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; we'll touch on model-driven conceptually in Chapter 4.

8. Two generations of controls

One quick note. You may see both modern and classic controls in Power Apps. Modern controls are the default in new apps and what this course uses throughout. If you open an older app at work and the buttons look different, that's classic, and it still works fine.

9. Why Power Apps?

A quick word on why Power Apps matters now. It's a low-code platform, and you build screens by dragging controls, and the logic is written 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. Let's practice!

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

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