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2 min read

Power Apps Ideas: New enhancements and increased capabilities

After we announced public preview of Power Apps Ideas, including writing Power Fx formulas with natural language and generating formulas from examples, we continued tuning the design and improving our AI model to make Ideas work better for you. Today, we’re happy to share some of the latest updates on Ideas with you.

Transforming natural language to formulas

  1. Expanded support for more data sources – Data source connections are no longer limited to Dataverse; you can now use Power Apps Ideas with galleries and data tables connected to other data sources, such as SharePoint and Excel.
  2. Supporting more ways to filter a data table – More data querying scenarios are supported including filter by Choice columns, Yes/No columns. Now you can try active ‘Contacts’ in Ideas to filter by Contact status.
  3. Improved understanding of natural language – In our efforts to provide an experience with language that really is “natural”, we made significant improvements to our AI model to make it smarter and understand more natural input. For example, instead of typing ‘Contacts’ whose ‘Full Name’ starts with “Yvonne”, you can simply type Full Name starts with Yvonne to get the same formula.
  4. Enhanced UI for formula suggestions – The formula suggestions are now displayed in cards, and there is a greater focus on the natural language description of what the formula is doing, so it will be easier for makers to review and understand the results.

Programming by example

  1. Increased region and language availability – Programming by example has rolled out to all the Power Apps regions and languages so more makers can benefit from it.
  2. Improved formula results – We made significant improvements in our AI model to make the resulting formula suggestions less complex while still providing the same functionality. Simplifying complicated formulas not only makes it easier to understand and maintain the formula, but also significantly enhances performance.

What’s next for Ideas

Transforming natural language to formulas:

  • Continue to add support of more scenarios including generating formulas to manipulate content of a label, changing color and visibility based on conditions, support filter by lookup columns.
  • Continue to enhance the model so it can better understand natural language queries and provide more accurate suggestions.
  • Improve the usability and discoverability of Ideas so it will become more handy and easier to find.

Programming by example:

  • Improve the model quality so it can generate accurate yet simple formulas.
  • Improve the usability of Train with examples, so when the suggested formula doesn’t meet your needs, you can easily tune the results by providing additional examples.
Norah Liu
Norah Liu