Microsoft 365 Community Power Platform, 28 Apr 2021

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From YouTube: Power Apps community call-April 2021

Description

Topics covered in this month’s community call include - Make your Power Apps sessions persistent when switching Microsoft Teams tabs!, Power Apps Custom Functions Library, Make your Power Apps user experience awesome with Gestalt design principles, and Recent Power Apps News and Community Contributions. This session included Q&A in chat. The call was hosted by Todd Baginski (Canviz). Demo presenters include Hardit Bhatia, Matthew Devaney, April Dunnam, Hiro Nagao, Geetha Sivasailam, Hugo Bernier, Anton Robbins and Rory Neary. Recorded on April 21, 2021. Thank for attending the call or viewing it on demand.

Learn more:
• See the full blog post for this call on the Tech Community Blog - https://aka.ms/m365pnp/community/blog
• Microsoft’s Power Platform website
• Power Apps Responsive Design | https://bit.ly/responsivepowerapps
• Power Apps Training Resources | https://aka.ms/PowerAppsTraining
• Power Apps Community | https://Community.PowerApps.com
• Power Apps Community Samples | https://aka.ms/PowerAppsCommunitySamples
• Power Apps Community Videos | https://aka.ms/PowerAppsCommunityVideos
• Power Addicts Hangout | https://wearepoweraddicts.com
• #LessCodeMorePower Video Series | https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8IYfXypsj2Cr4DUqMKYkGM-Wejfim2QX
• Share more - draw attention to your great work - #PowerAppsCC

Stay connected:
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• YouTube - https://aka.ms/M365DevYouTube
• Blogs - https://aka.ms/M365DevBlog
• Recurrent Invite - https://aka.ms/powerappscommunitycall

A

Hello and thanks for joining us today, everybody I'm todd baginski you're joining the april 2021 powerapps community call. We do this call every month in case you haven't joined us before, and we start at the same time at 8 a.m. Pacific time our call happens on the third wednesday of every month, and we have a great time in here. As you can see, we've already got a lot of people in the call here today and what we do every month.

A

Is we learn about the latest news and community contributions going on in the land of power apps all around the world? We also have people come in who are on the product team with powerapps. We have a couple of them here with us today and microsoft.

A

Employees join us and tell us where they're working on with powerapps, what's the cool new things that are coming, people like chuck sterling my co-host in april as well today and hugo- is here today, so we thank them for coming and telling us really the behind the scenes scoops on a lot of things to do with powerapps and then, as always, we do technical, deep dives, and so we invite people from microsoft, people outside of microsoft, folks from all over the world, just like we've got again here today, who are working on powerapps and love, powerapps and they're coming here to share with you what they've learned about it and how you can use that to make your powerapps awesome too.

A

How do we actually pull this together every month? Well, that happens with what I like to call our power crew, and so that's me on the right todd baginski, I'm the partner and cto at canvas consulting I'm a microsoft, fast track, recognized solution, architect for powerapps and mvp, and I just love powerapps and love hosting. This call with I like to call him captain charles sterling chuck. Have you been fishing this week down there in florida.

B

Every day, todd yeah what was the biggest thing you caught this week, uh 70 pound tarpon, which is not what I've been targeting. I want 150.

A

70 pounds not big enough for chuck, so, as you can see, he likes to uh do fishing in his spare time when he's not helping all of us in the powerapps community, the other four folks, you see on the slide here, dana andrew heather and gabriel they're, all behind the scenes every month, editing the video promoting the video, putting it up on youtube, making blog posts and things like that to help you find this video and watch it if you didn't, watch live so thanks to all those folks every single month for making this call possible.

A

Another thing that really is something above and beyond, who you actually see hosting this caller presenting today, are all the people on the chat channel.

A

These folks, I like to call our powerapps community chat, channel, gurus and there's again people from microsoft, powerapps, mvps, powerapps, champions power, addicts, power, everything if you've got a question about powerapps, throw it in the chat, channel and you're going to be surprised how quickly you get some great answers and getting led in the right direction.

A

We have such a fun community and these folks, as well as everyone here, is the reason behind that. So thank you.

A

All that brings us to our agenda for today, and so our agenda for today is we're going to start with hardik and he's going to tell us about how he's been working on power apps inside of microsoft teams and how to make sure, when you and working on the powerapps and teams and you bump out and work in something else in teams and come back, that your powerapp saves your data and how you're working on it and doesn't reset the app and frustrates you. So I know a lot of people are probably going.

A

Oh, my gosh that's happened to me before. I can't wait to see how to solve that. So that's what we have up first up. Second, then we have matthew april hero and geetha. How about that for a quad tag, team partnership they have all pulled together. A powerapps custom function, library and hugo has also joined in that I found about since I made this slide so they're going to tell us all about that.

A

Custom powerapps function, library and how you can use that function, library to jumpstart your powerapp projects too, then we're going to finish with rory today and rory is coming to us from the uk, and he is going to show us how to use gestalt design principles to make sure that, as you build your power app, your powerapp looks great and it really works great. So it's easy to use and makes sense for your users.

A

So I really can't wait to see that part too. Rory does a whole bunch of teaching with powerapps and teaches kids how to work with powerapps as well. So he's really good at teaching and knows his stuff, and I can't wait to see what he's got in store for us, even though I've already seen the slides in them then. Finally, as usual, we'll always finish with our recent powerapps news and community contributions. What has everybody been doing around the world? What is some cool new things?

A

You can go check out to make your power ups better. So, as you can see, we've got a lot in store and I'm going to jump right over now to heart it already thank you for coming on today. I imagine that you've been doing a lot of work with powerapps and teams lately and that's how you came up with this topic.

C

Right yeah, it's it's been something that I've been doing for the last approximately one year. Definitely one of my coolest projects crazy. At the same time, you know that perfect balance between craziness and fun is is what makes it interesting.

A

Yeah was, was this topic, something that you just got kind of personally annoyed with and decide to solve it, or was it something that you rolled your app out and then your users came back and went? Oh, my gosh, I'm bouncing back and forth between other things and teams in this power app. Can you fix this and make it easier on me.

C

So combination of both right uh so initially way back when this was introduced, you couldn't even pop out the powerapps maker outside. That was my biggest pain, because looking inside the studio get a chat message, you go to the chat and then you come back and then you know you will have to start all over again.

C

So that was my biggest pain point and then, um as people started using a couple of our apps, you know they started complaining about the same, because not all the apps would need this feature and I'll talk about the I'll talk about examples of which ones would need this the most. So it was a combination of both couple of makers complaining about it, and then you know people in general just complaining about the fact that you know using apps and teams is cool awesome.

C

But the fact that when you come back, you lose your entire session uh was a huge pain point.

D

A

Seen two different folks in the chat. I said this is a huge pain point for me too, so yeah feel free to take over the screen there and show us what you've got.

A

You know your your twitter profile pic must have been taken a little bit ago.

C

Yeah that was way back when, when I was uh then I did not have the covert weight gain and I was getting married, so I wasn't even married and that big, so the combination of covert and marriage results in this.

C

So most of you, I'm sure, if not all of you know about dataverse for teams, but just some background. It brings the capabilities of our platform into teams. um You can use powerapps power, automate flows, power, virtual agent boards right from within teams, and it's not just about using them. You can even create them from within teams, so so pretty powerful and makes a lot of sense, especially these days when um most of us spend a lot of time in teams right. So all of us are working from home. We chat a lot.

C

We have meetings and teams. So given the fact that we spend almost the entire time of our working day in teams, this just makes it more productive to stay within teams and still create all the fun stuff that you love. Creating.

C

I consider dataworks for teams, or I like to call it the lighter version of dataverse, and I don't mean that in a bad way, but some of the capabilities of full data works like row level security, some of the complex fields like polymorphic lookups.

C

They don't exist in dataworks for teams, so it is a lighter version, but I still think it's awesome, because it's a relational database and one thing that I really like about dataverse for teams, which is not yet available in dataverse app maker, is the fact that you can edit tables using the table. Editor almost like excel. So you open a table, you start entering data and it gets saved. So I think I think that's pretty cool.

C

So that's why it's it's when I say it's a lighter version, I'm not diminishing what data works for teams is it. It has a few features that are better than for dataverse, but then some of the complex features or the rich features that you get with full data burst are not available in database for teams it brings with it a set of new controls called fluent ui controls. They are awesome, the very first time when I looked at those controls. I had a bad reaction, which was why do these controls have less properties?

C

Power apps is all about canvas apps at least is all about customization. So why should I give up on a few properties and then eventually, slowly as I started using them, I felt that I think those controls are pretty cool because, yes, they come with less properties. For example, I don't think you can add a border to a label, but that's the whole point right.

C

uh If you start making a canvas app, if you don't pay enough attention to ui your app, even a functional can look pretty bad, so what this allows us to do is uh it allows us to create apps that look good uh without you paying any attention to the ui. Just to give you one quick example: if you add a button, you get a new property uh which asks if the button is a primary button or not.

C

If you say it's a primary button, it looks like the purple button you see in teams without use setting any color property for that button. So I think just for that reason. These controls are pretty slick. um I am not the best designer by any imagination, but the apps that I create within teams are actually looking way better than the apps I've created outside.

C

So I think those controls are pretty cool. If you haven't checked them out strongly suggest you do uh one thing to keep in mind. There are certain properties that have been renamed.

C

I think uh can't can't remember them off the top of my head, but properties have been renamed, so that has been throwing off makers a little bit, especially those who have used dataverse earlier, so do check it out. There is a link on microsoft, docs, which I can share, that explicitly lists out the properties that have been changed and then it it just provides better integration within teams. And, yes, we have the teams connector that we can use outside of dataworks for teams, but there is a teams.

C

Integration object when you create an app within dataverse for teams which gives you a lot of contextual information. With regards to where you are in a team. Are you in a meeting? Are you in a channel and so on and so forth? What is what is your team's mold or theme? Is it dark mode or is it high contrast? Is it default so a lot of cool stuff using the themes, integration object and if any one of you has used embedded canvas apps that has canvas apps inside of model driven apps?

C

You would know that there is a model driven form integration control uh which gives you the context of where your canvas app is or which record it's in. um So just like that there is this contextual integration object for data members for teams as well with that said in the last year, or so I think, we've created like five out-of-the-box sample apps for dataworks for teams. We are in the process of creating four or five more.

C

I'm going to talk about a couple of them where this particular feature that we will be reviewing today makes a lot of sense. I'm going to use inspection as an example.

C

So what that allows you to do is it allows you to set up areas or assets and then define inspection, forms or checklists, and then each checklist can have multiple checklist steps. The it comes with three apps. So if you install inspection from the teams, app store, you'll get three uh different apps one is the manage inspections app where you can set up areas you can set up. Checklists uh next is review inspection where you can review the finished inspections. It also gives you some basic analytics information using powerapps canvas app charts.

C

So even if you don't have power bi, you will get some insights into how the inspections are going and then the third is the end user. After inspection, which you can use to perform an actual inspection and there are multiple different ways. You can record your findings for each step. You can record if it was okay or no or if um it's it's not applicable, and then you can also add notes to each step, and then you can capture multiple images for each step, which foreign inspection makes a lot of sense.

C

What happens is when you open an app. uh Let's say within a channel and before that, let me let me get to one one other point. So there are two ways now or two places now, where you can add an app well, three one is within a meeting. I'm not gonna touch that for now.

C

um First way that you can add an app to teams is within a channel and then the other way which was rolled out uh not too long ago is broad distribution, where you can actually pin your app to the left nav in teams. It's just like how you have chat teams, calendar or meetings.

C

You can actually have an app pinned there, so you can easily access it without having to go inside of a channel, and I, like broad distribution, a lot because just like how you can pop out the maker studio now within teams, you can even pop out a broad distribution app from your left nav.

C

So keeping that one aside, if your app is inside a channel when you switch when you start the session, you start, let's say with inspections right, so you start recording your findings. Then you figure out that you need to go to another channel. Maybe I don't know you might want to go to wiki to get some information or you get a chat message that you have to reply to. When you come back to the app you lose all your information, so the session that you were in gets lost.

C

Let's see if this works fine, um I have a small recording of the inspection app on my phone. It's an older version. So if you install it now, it will look slightly different, but I'm going to select an area here. uh I selected a checklist step and then I'm going to start recording my findings. So the first is: okay, I'm going to add a note and I'm not going to add a picture because really isn't needed to illustrate the point.

C

But now, when I go back into the app it'll again, ask me if I want to perform an inspection and if I say yes, it will make me go through the entire process again and the information I added gets lost. Now in this particular example, it's a couple of steps.

C

Sure you can do that again right, but in reality most inspection forms have five or six or ten different steps, and if- and you might have captured images as well, so a lot of information that you can easily lose, which you have to which you will have to capture again. So it's a huge huge pain point and out of the five different apps, so inspection, employee ideas, bulletins milestones and issue reporting. This is the most relevant. This is most relevant for inspections and issue reporting, because these are used by front-end workers.

C

Who are uh you know, performing inspections or reporting an issue, and that's when you are capturing a lot of information. So you definitely need this feature uh if you're creating a project and milestones. Even if you lose a little bit of information, it's not that critical. Surely you can go into the app and add it again, but these two apps specifically inspections and issue reporting- will make this very painful.

C

So um what when we say that we need to retain a session? The first thing that comes to my mind is offline capability. Sure it's not exactly the same. You are still within network within range you're, not losing connectivity, but you're still kind of losing the connection with your app so because it sounds very familiar to offline capabilities.

C

That's why the approach that you can take to resolve this is the approach you take when making an app offline capable and the basic steps right. uh Are you save all your data in collections? Then you save that collection using save data on your as a local file on your device.

C

Then you load those collections using load data during app start and then, if based on what data you get back, you can redirect the users uh to the appropriate screen.

C

So with those changes, this is how the same app behaves. So I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to start an inspection.

C

I will select um area start the inspection now and then record the findings for the first step. So I'm going to mark this. Okay, add a note and then save it, and then I'm going to navigate out of this app go to another tab or or another chat, doesn't really matter, and then I'm going to go back into the app and see what happens so as I as the app loads it checks.

C

If there is data, if there is, I expose another button that says continue last inspection and it retains all the data that I had captured. So it says that I had recorded the first step as okay and I also added a node. If I would have captured images, they would show up here as well, so this this makes it pretty useful right. Users won't have to think twice before, navigating to another chat or tab within a team fearing that they lose all the data.

C

So with that said, with offline capabilities, excluding the windows app for power apps, which has its has a lot of issues- and I don't think, has been supported in a long time. uh Offline capabilities are supported on mobile devices. They don't work on web, but with data works for teams, they work on mobile devices and your team's desktop app. It still doesn't work within a browser which I really hope uh happens one day, uh but it brings those capabilities to desktop as well, so with that I'm gonna cover a few tips and best practices.

C

So if you have records especially ones that have image fields in them, don't store the entire record right. You can just store the good and when you load the app again, you can find the good do a look up and then get the full record.

C

This is uh important special, especially when you are on desktop, because the storage limit is limited to 1 mb and most of the pictures that we take these days are more than 1, mb or very close to 1 mb. So if you take one picture, you're done so that makes it very important that you conditionally store images based on the device that you're accessing the app from if you're on a mobile device feel free to store everything.

C

But if you are on desktop, you want to make sure you conditionally save data limiting the number of records you store or limiting the data that you store because of the storage limitations, which is 1 mb on the teams desktop app.

C

So how would you do that there is a parameter called host line type. It has four different values: web desktop, ios and android, so web is when you're accessing teams through a browser desktop is when you're accessing it through teams desktop and ios and android are, if you're accessing it through an iphone or an android device.

C

So what you can do in the app onstart is check what the value is for host client type. So I'm setting up this very simple variable uh checking for the client type. If it is web or desktop, then I'm setting that variable to false if it is ios or android. I'm setting that to true now after that, wherever I'm storing data storing my collections into local files using save data, I check for that variable. So if I'm on a mobile device, then save my collection of images.

C

If I'm not ignore the images, so with that one simple parameter, you can conditionally control what data you want to save if the user is on a mobile device versus if the user is accessing teams through desktop- and I I'll get to one of the best practices and tell you why this is important and how I ran into this accidentally.

C

So a couple of best practices here: first, one which applies not just to this particular use case, but whenever you use load data there is a third optional parameter called ignore, non-existent file. I set it to true every single time, because if you don't do that, when the when a user accesses this app for the very first time, data has not been saved yet on their local devices.

C

So in the app on start, when you do load data, it's not going to find the file, and it throws a very ugly error which you don't want to show to your end users, especially if they are accessing the app for the first time so set that to true. uh If load data doesn't find find that file, it will ignore it. If it does, it will load the data.

C

Second, is the clear data function? It's I don't think it's listed in the powerapps formula reference, but it is another function in this group of functions for saving data and loading data. Clear data, at least in my testing a few months ago, and um until until actually even a few weeks ago, doesn't work. It actually doesn't clear data in your local files and you can do a quick test to check if it works.

C

Now right, you can add a button, store, a text in a variable and then add that variable or try to save that variable into a local file. Using save data, then clear the data and check when you reload the app do you still see it and most likely you would you you will. So what I do is I clear the collection and then use save data. So it's a combination of clear and safe data that gives me the same result as clear data would have given the last one.

C

Here is an error message that you might see when you use save data. The error message is actually pretty misleading. It says there was a problem: saving your data name could be too long. When I first ran into this issue, I thought my collection names or my local file names are too long, so I actually went through the entire app renaming my collections renaming my local files, and I was still running into this issue.

C

That's when I figured out that this error comes up when the amount of data that you're trying to save is more than the limit so like I was actually storing images, even when I was accessing the app through the team's desktop app, and that's when I was getting this error so that conditionally, storing data when you are on desktop makes a lot of sense because it reduces the probability of you reaching the data limit and that prevents you from seeing this ugly error message right at the top in your app.

C

That's pretty much it from my from me today hope. uh Hopefully that was helpful and um thanks chuck and todd for giving me the opportunity to share it. Sharing this with the community.

D

You're welcome thanks for coming and sharing it with everybody. I see a few.

A

Different folks, talking about how helpful they find this in the chat already, there is one question that that popped in chat that you didn't answer along the way. I don't know if you even saw it, but it was related to trying this in sharepoint. Have you ever tried this in in a sharepoint power app? I I don't. um I've never tried save data and load data in in a to do that in the sharepoint form powerapp before so, I'm not sure. If that is capabilities available there, I think it would be.

C

So if you're accessing and again I haven't used sharepoint a lot, but if you're accessing sharepoint through a browser, I think it won't be supported. Just because uh save data load data are not supported in a browser. um That would be my uh guess, but yeah. It would definitely be fun to test it out and figure if that works.

A

So you probably, I don't know of any way to open up the powerapps player app and then open up the app associated with the sharepoint list. I just can't fathom how that would work, so I I guess in that case it's probably you're not going to be able to pull it off. For that one yeah great, thank you for sharing. That's awesome come on back next time. You have something else cool to share we'd love to have you again.

A

Thank you. You're welcome.

D

Okay, next matthew.

E

Awesome yeah. We we have got a ton of presenters on this particular topic, not only myself but the uh always wonderful april dunham uh gita, hero, nagio and anton robbins as well. So uh today we come to talk to you about the powerapps functions library, uh but before I do that uh todd I wanna ask you: have you ever heard of the dry principle of programming.

E

Stands for don't repeat yourself right, so anything worth doing is worth doing once, but uh anything that you've done once you shouldn't. Do it again right, and this manifests itself in several ways in powerapps right, the most obvious way is components, so we like to make a component once and then we have it forever right. We don't have to do that again now.

E

That concept also applies to custom functions, so this was a feature that was quietly released back in in.

F

E

uh Didn't get a lot of buzz, it's currently an experimental feature, but we now have the ability to create user-defined custom functions in powerapps right. So what does that mean? It means that you're not limited now to just the functions that are available in powerapps that have been programmed by the team at microsoft. You can actually go and make those for yourself now right.

E

So if, um in this example here, I wanted to make a function for uh to allow me to calculate the end of the month for any given you know day, and that concept exists in excel and in a couple other languages, and what I was able to do is I was able to create my own custom function in powerapps, where you just pass in the current day and out out comes the last day of the month.

E

So you take a look at that label right there, and you can see that it's it's it's doing that um that calculation.

E

So what we started to see was there's a bunch of us on twitter who are really super excited about this feature. I think hiro was the first person I bumped into bumped into gita bumped into penn warner and a few others along the way, and we started talking, we started collaborating, we said, and we started to say, like you know, each of us alone we're only you know one person and we're going ahead.

E

Making all these awesome awesome custom functions, um but wouldn't it be great if there's actually a place where we could go and share all these and the whole community could benefit and we could scale this whole thing up a lot faster and that's where april and hugo came in uh because, as you know, they they work with um the the pmp project, the patterns and practices. I think it's called uh project and I'm going to pass this over to april and she's going to show you what we've all uh started to put together.

G

Yeah thanks matthew, so um you know I heard from matthew that he was starting out. You know had this repo here where he was sharing his custom function samples. So I knew right away that I would love to get this under pmp, so we can get more people contributing. So that's what we did and what hugo um has graciously worked on and helped us build out here. If you go to aka dot.

G

Ms ford slash power platform, hyphen samples hugo has built this amazing sample browser for us to find all of these different power platform related samples, including the custom functions. So let's kind of walk you through what this experience looks like um you can make it so easy to start. Using you see that instantly. We have all these different filters.

G

We can apply so right now we're starting off with the custom functions right now, so we can have those samples there, but eventually this is going to be your one-stop shop, where you'll have power, automate samples, power-ups templates power, virtual agents, everything power platform related. We want this to be the place that you go to find those samples and those resources.

G

So we can filter by the type of resource you want to find, whether it's a power, fx sample or powerapps. Obviously we have search built in there. We can easily find if you know you want some kind of formula or function for date. Formatting like matthew was just talking about, or you know, regex expressions. We have that in there you can click those filters and find it that way and then, of course, click on one of the solutions there to read more about it.

G

So it's really intuitive simple and easy to use and a big shout out and thank you to hugo for making this possible in building this out for us hugo. Did you have anything to add there on this? Since you were able to join us? Thankfully,.

H

No you're you're doing uh you're doing great. Thank you.

G

All right cool, so uh yeah I'll turn it back over to keitha. I believe talking about how we can. So how can we contribute to this pnp repo here.

I

um So there are a couple of ways you can contribute. So one is, you can add a new sample.

I

So if you have an existing piece of feature or functionality that you think would make a good case for a custom function or something that you think would be really helpful for the community out there, then you know this is a place where you can go share a new sample and another way to also share samples is if in case, you see an existing bucket of um an overarching use case, for example like regular expressions or maybe uh geolocation utilities or even financial functions or any any kind of um any of the samples that we already have existing.

I

And if you think that you'd like to add something to it, then you could, you know, fork that project and and extend it and add your custom, libraries too, and then there's also a way for you to submit a sample request. So if you have a new idea- and you would like for the community of help around it, then you know you should go ahead and start submitting a sample request.

I

And then you know the rest of the community or the authors can jump in and see if they can help out by creating a custom function for you and then there's also an option for you to report a bug if needed.

I

So if you are using or consuming one of the samples- and you find that you want to add an update to it or maybe there's something- that's not working as you expected, then there's a way for you to report a bug as well and then hugo's help really has actually been generous enough to put together all of these uh landing screens for us- and you know they're so detailed and has everything that you need to know uh on how you can get started so that aka dot ms link over there.

I

That actually talks you through how you can contribute, has all the links and actually walks you through step by step on what you need to do, and you can always reach out to one of us as well. uh If you have troubles contributing or even consuming from the samples, we'll always be happy to help with that. I think next up is a little video um hugo. Do you want to talk through that.

H

I can do that so if you run into issues you can go to the repository where the sample resides and you can click on new issues and you'll see those different types of issues. Bugs suggestions, questions, sample requests.

H

We also have links to just starting a discussion if, if you're asking people hey, how would you do this or go to the tech community? But if you have a bug- and this is a bug related to a sample- we're not trying to support the power platform- you can just go here and all the the issue templates have information about how to get started. So we'll say things like delete everything above this uh or you know, please provide the sample name delete this. Please provide the authors.

H

We ask you to just to fill the information, because that's all the information we're going to use to be able to to help you and if you don't fill the template. If you don't give us the information about the bug, we're going to be spending the next few days, just going back and forth, asking you, okay, what sample are you talking about? Who wrote it and so on and so forth?

H

We will automatically close issues where you don't fill the template, because one thing you have to keep in mind is everybody? That's helping here? Is volunteering their time? So please respect everyone's time and if you, if you want us to be able to help you as fast as possible, just give us the information we need, but we look forward to seeing your samples, your sample requests and hopefully not too many bugs.

H

G

Yeah exactly so, that's one great way to contribute. Just by you know, filing bug, requests or you know, feature and feature requests and things like that. But, of course, how can you contribute and share a sample is going to be the big question so the way that we've decided to structure this is we're going to use the powerapps canvas app source code tooling, for that.

G

So, if you actually just unpack your canvas app solution that has the the component and the functions that you want to share unpack that and then submit that in your pull request to our repo we'll handle the rest so well, and the reason why we're doing that, I don't know if you want to elaborate on this hugo, but um that just really helps to make sure that we can inspect the code. um Rather so we don't have to go and upload it.

G

We can look at it from a code point of view make sure everything is, is kosher and looks good and we can have a single point of truth. That's a trusted source! So that's why we're using that that tooling there and then we'll do the rest, we'll pack it up back up into a ms app file, so that then you can use that in your and download that and import that into your environment, to use it um if you haven't used the source code tooling.

G

Yet I do have a video out there that kind of walks through how to install it, how to use it that you can. You can check out there. Also um we're going to be probably doing some sharing is carrying sessions on this like how to contribute and use that tooling, so that you can submit a sample there so be on the lookout for that eventually, once we get that ready um to to go there, hugo anything to add as far as the code and why our approach there.

H

uh I think the idea is you know if you look at a lot of the samples out there, they're in discussion groups they're on some people's websites and you have no way of knowing whether that code is is safe uh or whether it follows you know best practices and and recommended patterns.

H

So what we're suggesting here is, when you submit your sample again we're not going to take your msf file, we're going to take your source code, we're going to review the source code and we will pack it so knowing that the when people are consuming the samples they're using msf files that are coming from a trusted source. And that's that's really our goal. We want the sample browser to be the the trusted, authoritative source of information for all things, uh power platform.

G

Yep and speaking of using the samples, which is what you're all probably wanting to know, let's turn it over to hero. Let's talk more about that.

J

Yeah, some app makers may be worried that it will require the knowledge for the github and source code 2 to just using the samples, but don't worry it's not required. The library also provides the ms apb file, so it is quite a simple step to start you with samples just download, msapp and open in the pops.

J

So the download link is in each readme file, maybe um less than 10 clicks to start, then the add-on will show the how to start.

K

Yeah, I like it less than 10 clicks and, and so here's a quick one that we're going to show you how to download. Simply by going to the uh to the the github, it's going to give you a description. What's going to take place um and then, if you scroll down, you will have the download and from there you download it, and you have your beautiful uh msm app app at the bottom of your screen.

K

You go ahead and open it and then from there you're off to the races to uh try it out and play with it. So it's just that simple! um Okay, I can do it so I know everyone else can.

G

Yep that yeah again it's just just that simple. I guess that's all that we have for you, um so definitely go to the aka.ms forward, slash power platform, hyphen samples to browse what we have now and looking forward to seeing what you all contribute here.

E

And uh I'd love to just take a quick moment to recognize the contributions of a few folks who aren't on this call um like there's been a lot of pent-up demand to you know, find a way to contribute to the language. I think this is a really great way to do it. We have pen warner out of great britain who's contributed. You know about somewhere between 10 and 15 functions, helping you to validate things via regex. His work is super awesome.

E

I've also got coroon out of japan, who has some number conversion tools, and I'd also like to recognize laura. Graham brown. Who's also contributed to function as well, so lots of awesome contributors- and I hope, to see you all joining in and helping out with that real soon.

A

Fantastic, thank you all for joining us, hiro nice to meet you for the first time. That's really cool and anton the always dapper power rapper. I like the bow tie man. Thank you you all. That was great what a quick tag team presentation- I don't think I've ever seen so many people on the call like that collaborate on one. That was great. Thank you all lots of applause and I'm sure everyone is going to be very happy to get their hands on this one. Today, hugo you're going to see your telemetry spike today.

A

I bet you and tomorrow fantastic, more great news for the powerapp community and the next one we have up today is rory, so rory. Thank you for joining us today. I saw on twitter really looking forward to wanting what you're about to to teach us today. Yeah.

F

I I feel like like a proud parent of, but it's not my thing at all, um but but the the thing, the topic that I'm going to talk about, I think, is absolutely fascinating and actually the cool thing about it is we already know it? We just don't know we know it.

F

I thought I don't know if you remember it in friends, there was janice says you know, you love me, you just don't know it yet, but that's what it's like when you start principles, that's awesome, so we're all going to feel smarter after this, I hope so yeah. Even if the dog in the corner is going to feel smarter.

F

F

Okay, so today I'm going to talk to you about gestalt design principles. Now I've written this, what has turned out to be a very big course on powerapps and I was going down the route of all the functions and all the objects and and all sorts of different things when it's mod driven apps, all these sorts of things, but I I've actually brought out a module and to do with design principles that it's not just um gestalt. It's it's lots of others, but this gestalt design principles is really really cool.

F

So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to share my screen and I'm just going to run through the the idea of what gestalt principles actually are so gestalt principles are what actually came out in the 1900s. So there was a group of german.

F

I think it was psychologists and it's all about how we see the world, how we perceive objects, the importance of objects relative to other objects and and and it you will. I hope see that it's actually relevant to how you build your apps and how the people that are using your apps will understand them because, let's be honest, we live in a world where these apps don't come with instruction manuals. So this is one of the ways in which you can help your users to understand.

F

Understand things better like what we've got on the screen here, it's a hexagon. um They call it the honeycomb. It came out about 2004 it's about the vap value proposition, but the idea is that all these things help all of the elements that you can see are helping towards this value proposition and the reason why we know that, even by looking at it is because of the proximity of those things, so we I'm going to introduce some gestalt principles as we go along.

F

So, as I say, the the gestalt principles are all about how humans see the world. So if you can just stop for a moment and consider what we're looking at here, what are we looking at a lot most of us? Okay, we'll say it's the olympic rings and so on.

F

But actually it's not even rings remember what we're actually seeing here is: there's not one single ring, not one complete ring here at all and what the mind has done for us is actually it's actually bridged those gaps with the rings that you can see that they are all related to each other, because they've got proximity, and so what we'll see later on as we we investigate these gestalt principles in detail. Is that we'll see that they're they can be relevant to our apps?

F

Now, I'm going to be telling you lots of things that are true today, but I'm also going to be telling you one lie and that's just to keep you on your toes as we go through the presentation now, when you do gestalt principles.

F

Well, it's invisible, you don't even notice them being done well and- and we will see um a little bit of that later on, but when it's done badly, you end up with map which is just really really busy and and and where it's hard to see, what's actually going on um so and the other thing, that's true about gestalt principles and the objects that we put on the screen is that the more objects you put on the screen, the harder it gets to decide between which which object is more important than another or how that object relates to another one?

F

I hope I'm keeping everyone on on track here. um But, let's be honest, you know power ups, they are just objects on it on a 2d. You know on a 2d frame uh when we make them so, as I say, get started psychology early 1900s, so so now we're actually going to go on to what are the gestalt principles. Well, the very first one is one that is around proximity.

F

Now, if we look at these dots that we have here, we see that these these ones are actually very close to each of them. We can also see that these ones are quite close to each other, and so for that reason we might associate think of them.

F

As being you know, a kind of collection of some kind, and we also see that if we see this group here- and we can see another group here- and we also might perceive another group down here as well- but we probably don't see an entire group of all of them- we might not see that, but it proximity is a really important point as far as as far as how we arrange things and what you can see even in in this app that we're looking at here is that these objects here the rather these these the pieces of text that we can see they are close to each other.

F

And the reason for that is well it's because it's a gallery, but it's also because they they have similarities they they have a relationship with each other, um and actually you can probably say that you know you can start thinking about proximity, we'll talk about some other points that are relevant to what we're seeing on screen as well.

F

The other point is around common region and that's kind of kind of touched on it already. But what we're looking at here is that they have deliberately put borders around things and because they put a border around things, we can actually think that no, these four, these four objects here.

F

These are actually related to each other, because- and we think that, because because of the border that was put on there, so it's really important to think about that. That is an opportunity for you to make. Things seem like they are associated with with each other. If they in fact are so that's common region, we have another principle which is around closure, which I think is absolutely fascinating.

F

So many people uh in the audience will see and we'll they will see the panda to do with the world. Wildlife fund and they'll also see a triangle that is sitting in the middle of here. But in fact, as you can see, there is no triangle: it's just it's just something that is a construct from um from the objects that we can see and it it is a bit of juice. But at the same time, when we think about icons, that is exactly what's happening with icons.

F

All the time you can, you can see that they that they, you know the the mind is trying to to to you, know, fill in the gaps and so on, and that's why icons work well and one thing: that's cool about icons and images. Is images get processed 60 000 times more quickly than text? Does so that's a nice one for you there.

F

Similarity is another thing. That's that's important, so we also because these objects are either similar because of the color or because of the shape. We then start to associate with them done with each other. So we might think about this group here as being similar, and we also will think about this group as being similar and we'll think about this group as being similar or as well, but remember that the proximity principle will also make us think that these are similar and it's okay, if that's, if they really are.

F

But here's your problem is, if they aren't that's when you've got a problem.

F

So you me, you are sending messages to the people that are using your apps um when you, when you place your objects on the screen uh figure ground is another one doesn't get used that much, but essentially, if you place an object in front of another object, people perceive that one as being in front of it and somehow more important and there's also this element of continuity, which is this idea that the mind will actually just continue the lines that it sees and we've kind of seen a little bit of that already um and there's also an element of past experience.

F

So if you see a back icon and icons are brilliant examples of past experience because people use them or should use them in the same way. So here's the thing if it comes to icons, use icons for the purpose for which they were intended. Don't invent your own new way of doing them, because your audience probably won't understand them.

F

So now what I'd like to do is I'd like to move on to a little demo if I can, but I'm actually um yeah. Let me try this um so. Okay, we'll look at a model driven app. You can see the design principles that are in operation here. You can see um you can see the kind of proximity you can see that you can see. These ideas are taking place already in here, and you can even see that these these fields are are kind of in a bit of a box together.

F

So you can see that there's a some kind of relationship. You can even see that there's actually boxes around here they've actually done the border side of things. um So that's kind of cool I'll, just move on another one.

F

This is where I don't actually know how to move: okay, f11, we'll move on to this, so and and so here's the microsoft site. What we can see on here is that you can see that there's, okay, you've got the logo. You've got this grouping here. You've got another grouping here as well. You can see this grouping uh going on here, but they've actually done quite a clever um exercise here.

F

You've got all of the um you've got all of the these icons that have been used together and, and you can see that there's there's these gestalt principles are in operation here and for those of you that have been um been sort of astute. As far as this is concerned, um you'll actually see that this is in fact not the microsoft site. In fact, this is just an app and it just it's done to demonstrate that these principles can be brought into an app. So you've got these ideas of grouping and I've used.

F

I can't run what I've used: I've, I've, I've just used galleries and so on to to make it do what I wanted it to do, whereas that this, in fact, is the real microsoft site, but it just shows you that you can actually make an app that looks quite similar to to what you're saying here.

F

So I guess this kind of takes me to the end of the presentation. I think what I'd like to do, if I can, is just go back through and just remind ourselves of what we've actually seen so we've gone. This is about how humans see the world. It's all about the relative importance of objects. I told the lie done correctly: it's kind of invisible and it's it's how we we see the world lots of objects. It means it gets harder.

F

It came out in the 1900s you're talking about proximity, common region put borders on things, closure for your icons, just to use icons essentially and then use the similarity to do with color or shape that's useful to you and then maybe figure ground occasionally may be a useful concept for you to come up with.

F

So if you want to learn more about this, then you can go to powerplatformlearn.com and you can go through to the course and you can uh you know you can do get on with the you're learning there. It's actually a free course. uh There are a ridiculous amount of lessons there. I don't quite know why I did it, but um but it's there anyway, for you to consume so that takes me to the end of gestalt principles.

F

I hope you like it.

A

I like it a lot, I love how you built the site and then tricked us, and it was really a power app. So you drove that. I think a lot of people in chat noticed that too very nice. So your your course on on the powerapps will not only dive deep into this topic, but several others with powerapps right practically everything.

F

Yeah honestly well, there's there's two over 250 lessons. Most of them have got demos in and I'm just going to put it into the chat and it's free and we do have. We have group sessions where, where I kind of pick up a top topic of of one kind or another, um but really it's there for you to learn, because I, like I'm an accountant by trade so five years ago I stopped being an accountant and didn't know what I was going to do.

F

I got lucky um and I started doing power bi and so on got into the power platform. I even met charles along the way when I was setting up a little group. He was brilliant and um and sorry I gotta slow down yeah, so um yeah and um yeah, and so none of this cut is familiar to me. You know this this this stuff, I've just and I didn't want people to go through the same learning experience as I went through.

F

I want them to just learn things once if they can and not be going through youtube and just watching endless videos and watching and getting drawn into different areas they didn't intend to get into. So that's the idea. That's awesome, you're, a heck of a guy rory do my best.

A

Right on very good thanks and and come back again, we'd love to see another one of the cool topics that you have sometime, what an awesome job today by everyone. So many different folks and we fit it all in in the amount of time we have a couple minutes left to wrap up our call. Now I've seen lots of questions getting answered in chat today. That's always fun to see too a lot of high energy there in our resources slide.

A

Here we have everything that we've learned about this week, including rory's power platform, learn academy down here at the bottom, all kinds of training, resources, community samples and videos- and we even saw more from everybody about those great samples today, recent news in powerapp. Obviously the custom functions library you saw today the cool stuff of the gestalt principles and then don't forget our powerapps demo extravaganza is coming up and so we're going to start accepting nominations next month. So you can start your entries so find your teams or come up with your idea.

A

If you're going to jump in solo- and let's see who becomes our third demo extravaganza winner for the third year in a row here, it should be a lot of fun to see what everyone does entering their power apps or their powerapps components. We're going to have a like a playoff in a contest. If you will for both.

A

So you can learn all about that on aka dot. Ms slash powerapps demo extravaganza.

A

Chuck, I noticed you put this slide in here today. Would you like to talk about this one.

B

um If you guys hadn't noticed, we actually have a brand new uh user group, offering there's been a lot of feedback that um we wanted to actually have a close relationship with microsoft and the user groups. So we've actually went out and built an experience for user group leaders and user group members themselves to join and find and actually interact with music group members, so think about this in a world where we start getting back to a physical interaction. This looks great and right now, of course, these are all virtual.

B

I run the vancouver powerapps user group uh matter of fact. We have a meeting uh tomorrow night looking forward to it, so you can find my event. uh We're actually have my building the quiz app and you can find all the other user groups near you, even though near you is virtual still. So thank you very much. Todd you're welcome.

A

And, thank you. You do a great job driving all these things all around the world.

A

Let's take a moment to shout out to our awesome powerapps community, so I took uh my usual uh fun twitter power app and figured out everybody who tweeted powerapps cc in the last month and how many times they did it and I put it into thefunwordart.com and look at all our powerapp rockstars who are tweeting on this hashtag. I saw someone even asking about it in chat this week.

A

So if you're looking to find cool things going on with powerapps, you can follow this hashtag and see all kinds of great folks from the folks who join this call. So thanks everybody for spreading the great word and helping each other out there's a couple other places. In addition to all the other places, we already told you about where you can learn more about powerapps. It's it's not hard to get good at powerapps nowadays is it?

A

The first is the powerapps uh poweraddicts hangout and you can go to we r poweraddicts.com and join the hangout every single month. It's a call much like this, where different people come on and share what they're working on and everyone discusses it and learns a lot.

A

There's also the less code, more power, video series bought brought to us by donna and sarah, and they have this on channel nine. You can find this and it's even shorter versions, more snacky versions of what we do here, like they'll, have one person on for 10 to 15 minutes instead of an hour long call like we do once a month.

A

Finally, we'd like to say thanks: we have a lot of fun doing this every month. I can't believe how there's just continues to be no shortage of awesome folks, doing awesome things with powerapps and willing to share all that with everybody we we just see it month after month, and so thank you for all the folks in the community. Thanks for joining our call and being a part of it, we will post this call as soon as it's produced on the microsoft 365 developer, youtube channel. You can get updates about when that's done.

A

If you follow microsoft, 365 dev- and I would just like to say thanks again to all the presenters today and as always chuck it's great being here with you today, we will see you all again on may 19th next month, at 8 am pst for our next powerapps community. Call thanks a bunch.

C