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Power Apps is a service that lets you build business apps that run in a browser or on a phone or tablet, and no coding experience is required. Power Apps combines visual drag-and-drop concepts from PowerPoint with Excel-like expressions for logic and working with data.
If you're new to app building, Power Apps provides templates and sample data that you can use to quickly build an app, and then you can customize the app to better suit your needs. With some experience and creativity, you'll soon be developing your own apps from scratch. If you're a seasoned developer, you can take advantage of the advanced functionality and truly innovate. If you can imagine it, you can build it!
Generate an app automatically
It's easy to automatically generate an app in Power Apps. All you need to do is specify where you want your data to come from. Data is stored in a data source, and you can use data from a variety of data sources. Here are some common ones:
- Common Data Service (included with Power Apps) - a powerful way to store your business data
- SharePoint
- Excel
You can also generate an app automatically from a template. Each template is based on fictitious data in a cloud account, such as Dropbox. Explore specific screens and UI elements (called controls) to understand how they're configured, and experiment with customization to discover techniques that you can apply to your own apps.
Customize an app
If the default generated app doesn't meet your needs, you can customize it. For example, you might want to change the appearance or behavior of certain controls, or perhaps add an image or video. To learn more about customization, in the navigation pane on the left, click or tap Customize an app. You'll see a list of topics that pertain to the different things you can customize. Click or tap any of the topics to get step-by-step instructions.
For ideas on how to improve your app further, you can open a sample app to get a sense of what you can do with some creativity and a bit of experience. For more information, see Use a sample app.
Create an app from scratch
After you've generated an app or two automatically and gained some experience with customization, you can create an app from scratch. By working from the ground up, you gain flexibility in app design, flow, and controls, and you can incorporate a larger variety of data sources.
Share and run an app
When you finish your app and save it to the cloud, you can then share it with others in your organization. You control the level of permissions on your app - you decide which users or groups can run the app, and whether they can also customize it or share it with additional people in the organization.
You can run your own apps - and any apps shared with you - on Windows, iOS, Android, or in a web browser.
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