Microsoft 365 Community Community Demos, 18 Aug 2021

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From YouTube: Event Calendar Power App

Description

In this 12-minute citizen developer-focused demo, Juli Reid shows auto-populating events for current user in this calendar. See event dates for multiple regions in month and full year views by country. Simplify event scheduling by comparing holidays in up to 4 countries for specified month. Primary components - galleries, gallery wrap count and calendar function. Embed into a SharePoint page, 1 external data source, includes tooltips, and a sample will be available in mid-September. This is a Demo Extravaganza 2021 entry. This PnP Community demo is taken from the Microsoft Power Apps community call – August 2021, recorded on August 18, 2021.

Demo Presenter: Juli Reid

Supporting documents:
• Demo - PowerApps Calendar Control - Build your own using Galleries | https://youtu.be/SlfnhQgMXrY
• Blog - Tooltips, not just a boring description | https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Community-Blog/Tooltips-not-just-a-boring-description/ba-p/1213901
• Demo - Visual Holiday Calendar Demo | https://youtu.be/NKNCsq3iF8I

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• YouTube https://aka.ms/m365pnp/videos
• Blogs https://aka.ms/m365pnp/community/blog
• Call attention to your great work by using #PowerAppsCC and #PnPWeekly on Twitter.

A

This is actually really exciting. For me. I started my powerapps journey just two years ago in august and created published my very first app on september 3rd of that year. So to have come this far, where I'm an active member of the power platform community and helping people and publishing some blog articles and having an app that I can demonstrate is really cool and this actually, I love hearing the.

B

Stories like that, um this technology seems to really enable that um you're, not the first person who's, told a story. Who's been on the call like that, I'm like hey, I just got started with this and check out how far I got already. That's really great.

A

Well, we also, we enabled set up a whole citizen development community in the last year around the power platform, um so we've really been working on that, but this particular app was designed to solve a business name.

A

So this is this is what we have right now we have this lovely list that is pages and pages long for all of our various offices, and while it's nice to look at this, you really can't compare anything, and this particular little filter is not really helpful.

A

You can't compare anything you can't see what day of the week it's on and our users want something better.

A

So, thanks to a recent video put out by shane young about creating a calendar, I have resolved this for us, and this is I'm going to show you this page first, um simply because this is his calendar in his video is just a single month and you can go through it, so we have our holidays. We have our month, uh and so we have our list, but we also have this little. Visual here um gives us the highlighted day of the week.

A

If we hover over it, it tells us what the holiday is, which is really nice, and we can go. Let's find a country that we have that has uh regions. So we get a couple of different things here.

A

We can see no holidays in the system to bring this up, and the reason for that is because, in spain there are two different calendars: one for madrid and one for barcelona and because they're different, we do them separately, but we can view all of them together, and here we have individual holidays, but because we have them in different locations. This isn't showing the holiday name anymore. It's showing us the location so that we get this visual. Well, where is this holiday at is in both places? Is it in barcelona? Is it in madrid.

A

In their shared holidays, you can see here is in both barcelona and madrid, different color, or we can choose to view them just by a single region, but our users wanted something more than this. This is really great. We can go back and forth.

A

It changes the year if we go forward, so we don't have any holidays in here now for 2022 yet, but you can see that we're looking at 2022 and these dates will be correct and on the correct day of the week, regardless of how far we go, whether it's a leap year whatever it is, this is going to work, which is fantastic and I'm going to spare you explaining why it's going to work because shane in his video, which I've linked to in resources, does a much better job of explaining it than I do.

A

But again, our users want something different and better and more so we have this we've given them a full year view. It has the same features as the month view with the single uh countries with single regions, countries with multiple regions or locations.

A

Sorry, this is a little slow.

A

You know vpn, isn't always the fastest thing here and you can see the challenge this is. uh This is a long list of holidays, which is why the visual comes in so handy.

A

We have again our tool tip, and this is the tool tip by the way, pulling up this information. There's a link to the blog article. I wrote about using a tooltip in this manner where it's not static, typed in text, it's looking some information up to provide you, the information that you're, seeing and again we can choose a single region here and we're going to run into this.

A

There we go, but I think for me the part that I, like the best that I had the most fun with. Was this compare feature and again I apologize for the slowness, because in demonstrating this out to a bunch of users, they came back with well, we still need the ability to compare. I need to compare I've teams in two locations and I need to know what days they're all in the office, so we gave them a compare.

A

And this allows them to compare up to four different countries and but we're back to lists again. Well, I suppose lists are good, but we can also compare by calendar, so they have the option.

A

Let's see where we're at we're in 2021.

A

I think it's because the network's slow, we should be seeing some highlighted days here right now and it hasn't uh hasn't popped up, but as you can see, having the ability to view it this way or this way makes it extremely flexible and it doesn't have to be holidays. You could do this for anything. You could do it for any kind of events that you wanted to do.

A

So it's a it's a really handy tool.

B

What was the most challenging part of building this particular power? App julie,.

A

Do you know the actually, the most challenging part came in or one of the most challenging parts um was building, because each of these is an individual set of galleries. So there are 24 galleries that compose this right here I had to work that out, but there is a lot of calendar math involved in this.

A

It's not just sequence, so there's a lot of date, adding and date values that go into making this up, and that probably for me, was the most challenging part of putting this together, but the features the key features that are used in this are secrets, of course, and the gallery wrap count, which is something I didn't know anything about. I had never paid attention to it. I didn't know what it did, so the gallery wrap count is what allows you to put this on a single row.

A

This right here, let's go here, it'll, be a little easier to look at. This is a gallery right here. Just this row is a gallery with a single row with a wrap count.

A

This down here is another gallery with another wrap count of seven. That gives us these seven.

A

Days here and and you match them up, but the wrap count, the date time math and the calendar function and the calendar functions another one I didn't know anything about.

A

The calendar function is what allows me to get this.

A

It brings me the days of the week and then I can choose to use a text function to just get the first letter or, if I use short it would give me the short names, s-u-n, m-o-n and so on, um but those are the key things that I used and that I found so fun about this.

A

For me, making power apps is all about making it work, getting a vision and making it work, and that's what excites me about it, and the neat thing is: this is only has one external data source.

B

That sure makes it simple. I bet everybody at your company was really happy to go from the first experience. You showed us in the very first screenshot to this very.

A

Well, we haven't rolled it out yet, but we're getting there. The people that we have shopped it out to are excited they're. They can't wait to see it in action and I hope to have this put out as a sample uh here in the next couple of weeks.

B

Fantastic I've seen a few different power apps with uh one calendar sample, but none of them that put 12 on a page like you've done that's going to be really cool.

C

Julie, I have a question for you on that last view where you have the different calendars. Is that you actually doing that layout or is it uh you're using the responsive containers.

A

um You know I have not really gotten into responsive containers. um Okay at all, so I did that layout uh based on what what I apologize is that my network's really slow. um I did that layout, based on what our need was, because this is going to be surfaced out on a sharepoint page.

C

A

Then, actually.

C

And that actually answers daniel holliday's question. Is he yeah? I was then asking that. Do you then embed this into a sharepoint, and the answer is obviously yes,.

A

Yes, it's in sharepoint and the next my next piece that I'm working on with this is to turn each of those calendars uh create a component out of those.

C

ah Of course, that makes sense that we could drop it into any app.

A

Right and then maybe responsive containers, I'm I'm starting to learn a little bit about those uh in dataverse, because if, if you do a screen that starts with data, it's got a responsive container built already the way the screen is built. It uses them. So I am learning a little bit, but I didn't know about it when I did this.

C

A

So I'll, let you have your screen back. Thank you for letting me share.

B

You're amazing, thank you for joining us love to hear those stories. uh Like you told at the beginning of people who just got started with this tech and having great time with it and sharing it's really cool.