Increase your canvas space by closing the tree view

As PowerApps grew to have more features, the amount of space in the interface needed for those tools, views, properties and more also exploded. A frequent lament we heard from several users was that there is not enough room to work on the canvas, especially when working with a larger app. The desire to see the whole app without it being tiny would help make authoring easier.

To address this feedback, we have introduced a new sidebar into the canvas studio. Rolling out worldwide, you can now close the tree view and open it up again off of the sidebar.

There are two ways to close an item off of the sidebar.  To close the tree view, select the icon again in the sidebar, or select the close button of the pane. To open it up again, simply select the icon.

For those who fear the extra few pixels on the left taking up more of the space in order to let people open and close the tree view – this sidebar is very much intentional to give back this space permanently in order to accommodate other experiences but still allow maximum space for the canvas area.

The functionality of the tree view remains the same, but there is also another small change. After looking at the low usage of the thumbnail view and seeing that very few (a half percent) of people ever opened the thumbnail view, we have removed this functionality for now to focus on other experiences.

We, as always, are open to your feedback on this new user experience.