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3 min read

Create an app automatically from your data in PowerApps

Today I want to introduce you to a feature we dearly love in the PowerApps team, and hopefully will earn your love as well. We call it “Create an app from your data,” and it empowers you to automatically create an app by connecting PowerApps to your existing data sources like a list on SharePoint Online, an Excel file on OneDrive for Business, a table in Salesforce, and many more.

Get an app that let’s your browse the list of items, view details of an item, and edit or add an item
App

How do you use it?

Here is a quick video to show you how easy it is to create, customize and play with an app in just 5 minutes:
 

Now that you saw how easy it is, follow our documentation as shown in the video to get your first app. Here are the only 5 steps you need to create your app:

  1. Install the PowerApps Studio app from the Windows Store, and login with your work or school account.
  2. On New, select one of the most commonly used connections or click more to select from more than 20 connections we currently support.

    connections
  3. Once you select a connection, browse to your list, excel table, or database table, and click Connect.

    select table
  4. PowerApps will read your data and its structure to generate the app for you.
  5. Run the app, customize it to your needs, save it and share it with your team or your organization.

Why do you want to use it?

Now that you have experienced how easy it can be to create an app, let’s look at few reasons why you want to use “Create an app from your data”:

  1. It is the quickest way to get started, simply connect to your data source and have an app created for you. The created app let’s your browse the list of items, view details of an item, and edit, add or remove an item from your table.
  2. We have tried to make the most common customizations, like changing themes and layouts, easy to do via simple point & click actions. Read more about how to customize a gallery or a form.

    customize
  3. It works with a large set of connections out of box, we are working on adding more sources or you can connect to your APIs.
  4. You can customize the app further as your needs evolve. You can add more screens, connect to multiple data sources, or add additional controls to fit your business needs.

What are the current limitations?

While it is really simple to use, we know that we have certain limitations and we working hard to provide you a better experience. A list of known limitations you may run into:

  1. We are currently able to generate apps that work on a single table. We are working on providing you support for lookups and multiple tables.
  2. Our current connections are limited to work on first five hundred records from your table due to a limitation in our ability to delegate both filtering and sorting to the services. We are working to remove these limits and all your apps (existing or new) will begin to scale as we release updates soon.
  3. We use heuristics based on the metadata from the connection, so we sometimes generate app which may not fit your needs without customizations. We are continuously improving the data we get from connections & our heuristics to be able to generate even better apps for you.
  4. We are able to generate apps currently only for Phone layout. We are working to enable support for Tablets layout.

Experience the ease of creating apps in five minutes by following our sample scenario in our documentation.

I hope you will find this feature useful for your needs, and remember to connect with PowerApps community to get answers to your questions, report issues, and submit ideas.

Ankit Saraf