The power of mobile first apps

- [Instructor] With Power Apps, you and I can create, build, publish, edit, modify, and manage applications for mobile devices or the web. And by mobile devices, I don't just mean phones because we can use Power Apps to take advantage of all the real estate that's available on an iPad or a Windows tablet. Mobile devices like phones have other features like multiple cameras and GPS that we don't normally find in a desktop computer, but we can use these features in a Power app so that our users can capture images or we can provide different choices based on a user's location. The other thing we do in Power Apps is we publish our apps and we share them with others, because we're not building just for ourselves. We're usually building Power Apps that will solve a problem for others as well. The Power Apps Studio is where we do this work, make.powerapps.com. The Power Apps Studio design environment allows you to connect to over 1000 data sources and services, and we also manage and share the apps that we've created here in make.powerapps.com. So let's go there. I've logged into make.powerapps.com. The first time you get here, it might ask you to enter your email and your password for credentials, but usually after that, as long as you're logged into Microsoft 365, logging into Power Apps is just going to be super smooth. A couple of things I want you to pay attention to before we continue because this is the order in which I do them. The first thing is that when we create things in the Power platform, like an application or a particular agent or a workflow, it is put in a particular environment and some of them are impossible to move afterwards. None of them are easy to move. So you really want to make sure you're in the right environment. If you click and you only have one environment, and that's an environment that you use to run Power Apps, you might want to talk to your Power Apps administrator and ask them, do they want you creating things in that environment? Typically, you'll get something that's like a sandbox that you can use. This is an actual environment here that's being used. I don't want to create something in here. So make sure that your environment is correct, and if you're unclear, this is the time to get that figured out and take care of it. Next, right now there's a new Power Apps experience that they're letting us have a preview of so you can click here. You know, we build plans and it gives us things. There's not a lot here right now, so I'm simply going to back up to the current environment. Let's build an app. It gives us a few more things to look at, but down the road this is what's coming and it never hurts for us to check it and see what it's going to look like. On the left hand side, I have the left rail here where I can go to home, which is right here where I can click create and create a new application. This is where I know that I can start from scratch with just a blank app, or I can start with a table from the Dataverse. More on that in a moment. I can start with a SharePoint list, not a library right now, but a list, data in Excel, SQL, or an image of an application. All of those are ways I can create. And as you scroll down, you'll see that we also at the bottom have some templates. Before you create something new from scratch, make sure that there isn't an existing template to help you build it. And you'll see more about templates in a bit. Information from Microsoft Learn on what's new, other things that you might want to know about, apps that have already been created down here, and also the ability to create an app starting with Copilot, for example, starting with data, starting with a page of design. When I click tables, what I'm seeing here is Dataverse for my organization in this environment, because each environment typically has its own Dataverse. So, these are the recommended tables, the frequently used tables, things like product, organization, and so on. But the Dataverse has hundreds of tables. If you click all here, you'll start to get a sense of how many tables there might be. You can scroll for a while and you're still on the letter A. If someone in your organization has created custom tables that you can have access to, they're here as well. The Dataverse tables are incredibly useful because in the past if you were going to create a new application, you often needed to start by creating a database for the application. Here, they're already built for you, yet they're customizable. You can change any of these tables, you can add columns, for example, to tables. At the bottom of the left rail, we have a button that will let you go to any of the other members of the Power platform tool set. Now that we've taken a quick tour of Microsoft Power Apps at make.powerapps.com, we can build some apps. So I will see you in the next movie.