What’s new: Power Apps April 2023 Feature Update
Welcome to the Power Apps monthly feature update! We will use this blog to share a summary of product, community, and learning updates from throughout the month so you can access it in one easy place. A variety of new and highly anticipated features are now available which we are very excited to share including Managed Environment Updates, new Variable and Collections experience, and improvements to offline on mobile!
We are continuing to improve and simplify the platform, with updates in Trust, Maker and End User Productivity as well as new video and doc contents to help you adopt and optimize Power Apps within your organization.
Trust
- Request a Power Apps premium license from org admins
Maker Productivity
- Supercharge collaboration in the Canvas Studio with the General Availability of comments
- Improved variables and collections experience in Canvas Designer
- Recent improvements to the Modern App Designer
- Create Custom Connector from within Visual Studio
- Update forms and views more conveniently with table designer
- Updates to simplify using JSON
End User Productivity
- Announcing General availability of Offline sync at a glance
- Announcing public preview of checking who has access to a record
Trust
Request a Power Apps premium license from org admins
Users can now request a premium license from their org admins, in product! can also manage these requests or configure the settings to continue using their custom process in M365 Admin Center. Check out the blog below to learn more and for links to documentation!
Learn more at New: Request a Power Apps premium license from org admins | Microsoft Power Apps
Maker Productivity
Supercharge collaboration in the Canvas Studio with the General Availability of comments
Get ready to take collaboration to the next level! We are thrilled to announce the General Availability of comments in the Canvas Studio! We know that providing & interacting with feedback during app development is crucial to creating top-notch apps. With this feature, makers can easily add comments to their apps, enhancing collaboration with their fusion team and leading to better canvas apps.
In the Canvas Studio, you can easily add comments by right clicking on (1) the “…” of any item under Tree View, (2) component in the canvas area, or (3) selecting the “Comments” button on the command bar in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Additionally, you can tag colleagues in the comments by using “@” and their name, and the tagged colleague will receive a notification email so they can see & get to the comment quickly & easily. If you tag a user that doesn’t have access to your app, then you’ll be prompted to share the app with them. Finally, makers can edit, delete, resolve, and reopen comments like the Office commenting experiences we enjoy.
Comments allow makers to keep track of feedback and suggestions with ease, as comments are stored within the app and can be easily accessed by anyone who has access to it. This capability is particularly useful for remote teams or teams that work across different time zones. We’re thrilled about this new feature and can’t wait to see the amazing apps you’ll create with it. In the upcoming future, we will enable the ability to export comments via Excel & import them into an environment of your choice.To learn more about commenting in Canvas Studio and how to get started, check out our docs or blog on this topic.
Learn more at Streamline collaboration with the General Availability of comments in Power Apps and Power Automate | Microsoft Power Apps
Improved variables and collections experience in Canvas Designer
In the new variables and collections experience, app makers can now define and interact with them in real-time while designing the app. This creates a more intuitive and seamless app-building process where makers can focus on building apps efficiently without unnecessary back and forth clicks.
Learn more at Improved variables and collections experience in Canvas Designer | Microsoft Power Apps
Recent improvements to the Modern App Designer
App navigation is now the default panel in the designer, allowing makers to edit the sitemap efficiently. The Pages panel now has a restructured hierarchy to better align with makers’ mental model and accurately reflect any coauthoring personas. Component designers now open within the app designer, along with improved discoverability to entry points.
Learn more at Recent improvements to the Modern App Designer | Microsoft Power Apps
Create Custom Connector from within Visual Studio
Power Platform is now a connected service in Visual Studio 2022 Preview! Code-first developers will now be able to create both APIs and connectors from within Microsoft Visual Studio, thereby minimizing context switching when developing custom connectors for Microsoft Power Platform.
Learn more at Create a Custom Connector for your Web API from within Visual Studio | Microsoft Power Apps
Update forms and views more conveniently with table designer
With this new experience, makers can now add columns to their forms and views on the fly, instead of navigating away from their table to update their forms and views manually. This also means when working with table in the modern app designer, makers can see the forms and views in their apps updated in real time once they finish working on their tables.
Learn more at Update forms and views more conveniently with table designer | Microsoft Power Apps
Updates to simplify using JSON
ParseJSON() and untyped objects are very flexible, but we’ve heard your feedback that improvements are needed to require less code and make untyped objects easier to use. So today’s announcement is all about implicit type conversion, or coercion. For untyped objects it means the automatic conversion of untyped objects to the actual type required based on the context. We will do this for all simple scalar types: booleans, numbers, text, GUIDs, colors, dates and times.
Learn more at Updates to simplify using JSON | Microsoft Power Apps
End User Productivity
Announcing General availability of Offline sync at a glance
As a frontline worker, it’s critical to access your apps and data wherever you are and whenever you want. For a few years, you’ve been able to use offline for model-driven apps bring your data with you. When you’re working in spotty conditions, you also need to understand at a glance whether your app is synchronized with the latest updates or whether your edits have been saved to Dataverse.
We are excited to announce the general availability of Offline sync at a glance. We’ve introduced a new device status indicator that is always visible in the main navigation bar of forms and grids in model-driven apps. This indicator gives you a quick view of your server connectivity and sync state, putting offline at the center of the experience so that you always know whether your device and data are ready to go.
Learn more at View offline sync status – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn
Announcing public preview of checking who has access to a record
The owner of records can easily share their records with other colleagues to collaborate in Microsoft Dataverse. We have extended the Check Access function to include getting the list of all the users who have access to a record.
For shared to users who are not the record owner, they can also see all the users who has access to a record and who the record owner is.
Learn more at Check your user access and permissions – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn
Video, Learning and Doc Updates
See new videos released by our Power CAT and Cloud Advocacy teams on Express Design and Custom Connectors.
 | Managed Environments New Features Managed Environments now have TWICE as many features. See how custom maker welcome experiences, solution checker environment and new features for pipelines like extensibility for custom logic pre- and post- deployment and delegated deployments with service principals make managing Power Platform at scale better than ever. |
 | Power Platform Pipelines Series Daniel Laskewitz and Prabhat Pandey break down everything you need to know about Power Platform Pipelines in this Low Code Revolution series. |
 | Unleash the Power of Azure OpenAI Service with AI Builder Join host Daniel Laskewitz and guest Ashish Bhatia as they explore the exciting possibilities of integrating the powerful Azure OpenAI Service functionality through AI Builder. Discover how this integration can streamline your workflow and help you achieve new levels of efficiency and productivity. |
 | Responsible AI Principles for Power Platform Developers Generative AI is making its way into many of the Power Platform tools that we use. Join us to learn about what new functionality generative AI is unlocking for low code development with the Power Platform and how to use these new AI features responsibly. Cedric Golmard joins us to discuss what responsible AI is and how do you apply these principles to the solutions you build using AI in the Power Platform. |
We’ve also released new, and made updates to some of our documentation – see a summary before of some of the key updates:
Please continue sending us your feedback on features you would like to see in Power Apps. We hope that you enjoy the update!
