Try the new Power Fx Formula Bar in Power Apps Studio

A new Power Fx editing experience

Today we are announcing a new Power Fx formula editing experience in Power Apps Studio.  The new formula editor is available an experimental feature that we encourage you to turn on in your apps and try out!  The new editor is based on the powerful Monaco shared code editor component which allows us to provide you with better performance, a consistent editing experience across Studio, and additional error highlighting improvements.  We are very eager to hear your feedback on this as we continue to iterate on Power Fx editing. 

Formula Bar History

Some of you may remember that back in back in 2019, we introduced an “Enhanced Formula Bar.” This was our first attempt at a new formula bar architecture, and it brought many top customer requested improvements to the formula editing experience.  Then, in 2021 we announced that many of those features were being merged into the original formula bar and the “Enhanced Formula Bar” was being retired.  We promised in 2021 that we were starting work on a new iteration of the Studio formula bar that would allow us to bring back the goodness of Enhanced Formula Bar, and today is the first step of this journey!

Improvements to Power Fx editing

Power Fx is central to building rich apps, so we endeavor to provide an experience that is helpful, performant, and that makes Power Fx easy to write and maintain.  Here are some improvements you will see today.

Consistent editing

When you opt into this feature, you will see a different editor in the main Studio formula bar at the top of the canvas area, and when you edit control properties in the Advanced pane along the right. With this, the Power Fx editing experience is now consistent wherever you edit formulas within Studio.

Improved suggestions and completion

Completion suggestions and signature help is faster, more performant, and is shown with a more modern-looking experience:

Enhanced error highlighting

Customers told us that one of the most missed features of the Enhanced Formula Bar was the error highlighting along the right-hand side of the editor.  This is now back in the product with the new experimental feature.  This lets you quickly identify where in your formula block you have an error, which is particularly helpful if you have very long formulas. 

In the queue and coming next

We are going to iterate on this and push out new features when they are ready.  Right now, there are a couple things you might notice are not there including:

• The Fx dropdown which lists Power Fx functions
• Find and replace
• Properties grouped by category in the left-hand side dropdown
• Certain syntax and control highlighting within the editor

We have work booked to eventually add back the most important features, but we need your help prioritizing.  Let us know which of these we should be prioritizing and if you have other requests or ideas for improvement.

Opt in today!  Turn it on for your apps

This is an experimental feature, which means it is off by default.  You will need to opt in by flipping the switch in the Upcoming features dialog.  This switch applies to individual apps, so if you turn it on within one app that means you’ll only see the new experience in that app.  Turn it on explicitly in each app for which you want to use the new experience.

Setting us up to deliver more, faster editing improvements in the future

Behind the scenes, this change to a standardized editor lays important architectural groundwork for many future improvements that will be coming to Power Fx editing within Studio.  Customers have asked us for several enhancements to the editing experience like line numbering, block collapsing, and a dockable or full-screen editor.  While these changes aren’t there yet, we’ve eased the way for us to make faster incremental improvements going forward.  As usage of Power Fx grows across Power Platform, we endeavor to make these features available wherever Power Fx editing happens.  Our direction here is to have this be the core experience, eventually removing the existing formula bar in favor of this new one.  This makes your feedback critically important!  We’d love to hear what you would like to see next and what would make the biggest positive impact to you as a maker.  Give us feedback by creating a new post in this thread: Power Apps Experimental Features community forum