PowerApps and SharePoint – the next wave of creating and running apps

Today’s announcements at the SharePoint Virtual Summit bring out the best features of PowerApps with SharePoint. We are embarking on a journey to unleash cool capabilities for authoring apps and running apps embedded in SharePoint to enable a seamless experience. We are excited to announce the following capabilities in PowerApps, which we'll be rolling out in the coming months. You can see a preview of these capabilities in the video at the end of this post.

 

Custom forms for SharePoint lists

You can create visually rich, well formatted forms using PowerApps for SharePoint lists. From the SharePoint list, you will see a “Customize with PowerApps” option to launch the PowerApps authoring experience in the browser. Once published, the rich forms will be embedded within the SharePoint list and available to all users of the list.

 

Screen Explorer for managing controls

PowerApps Studio will include a Screen Explorer to view the list of controls in the app. Every control can now be selected by choosing them on the screen explorer. The screen explorer removes the hassle of selecting hidden or overlapping controls. Of course, you could always switch back to the tile view that exists today.

Note: Screen Explorer will be available for app authors connecting to all data sources including SharePoint

 

Options panel to configure control properties

The Options panel on the right of the design canvas will light up the frequently used properties for every control. Simply select the control in the screen explorer and start configuring the properties using the options panel without the need to write expressions.

Note: Options panel will be available for app authors connecting to all data sources including SharePoint

 

Embed PowerApps in SharePoint pages

PowerApps can be embedded as SharePoint Online web parts. You will be able to browse and embed PowerApps in SharePoint. You can get started today by using the Content Embed web part outlined in this post. We will be rolling out more enhancements to this experience going forward.

 

Summary

PowerApps is excited to have built this experience enabling SharePoint users create business apps with zero code. We will also be adding support for images, attachments, and managed meta-data with SharePoint Online.

We expect to roll out functionality incrementally in the coming months and would love to hear your feedback.

For more details on how PowerApps and Microsoft Flow enable zero code business process apps in SharePoint, please watch our Microsoft Mechanics video: