Blog - Recent Posts

Controls - How to enter and display Office/Microsoft 365 email addresses with a combo box

When building data entry screens, a common requirement is to simplify the entry of email addresses by providing a combo box that displays all the email addresses that are available throughout the Microsoft/Office 365 tenant. This post describes the formula to build and configure this type of combo box.

Gallery control - How to set no selected item in a gallery

There are cases where we want to clear all selected items in a gallery control, or to configure a gallery control so that no items are selected on load.This post describes how to configure a gallery control to behave in this manner.

Dates - 4 tips to make sure that dates display correctly in UK "dd mm yyyy" format

A common requirement for UK app builders is to configure canvas apps to aways accept and display dates in "dd/mm/yyyy" format.This post describes 4 tips to help ensure that date picker and label controls display dates as expected.

Forms - How to select-all / unselect-all checkbox or toggle controls on a form

When building data entry screens, we can simplify data entry by adding a feature to select all, or to unselect all true/false values on a form. This post walks through how to build this feature.

Excel vs SharePoint vs Dataverse vs SQL Server - updated 2021

When building canvas apps, an important question is - what data source should use? This post covers the pros and cons of the 4 most popular data sources with Power Apps - Excel, SharePoint, Dataverse, and SQL Server.

Connectors - How to use the Microsoft Teams connector to add messages/meeting invites to Teams

From Power Apps, we can use the Microsoft Teams connector to perform tasks in Teams. The syntax to call some of these methods can be complicated and therefore, this post describes how to carry out common tasks, including how to send messages and how to send meeting invites.

Troubleshooting - How to use the 'app checker' to fix a broken 'service desk' template app

When an app stops working, we can use the 'app checker'  to review the errors. To demonstrate how this works, this post describes the errors that can occur when template apps become outdated, and walks through the process of troubleshooting how to fix an app with this tool.

Dates - Examples of how to calculate dates relative to today

There's often the need to perform date calculations that are relative to the today's date. For example, what's the start date of the current week? What's the last day of the current quarter, or the last day of the current month? This post highlights several useful formulas that can help in this situation.

Performance - Why is LookUp better than First/Filter?

Two popular ways to retrieve a single record are to call LookUp, or First(Filter. From a performance perspective, it's better practice to call the LookUp function to return a single record. This to post describes the reason why it's better to call LookUp, compared to First/Filter.

Troubleshooting - How to recover corrupted screens

On rare occasions, screens can come corrupt. On these occasions, we can sometimes recover our work by using the duplicate screen option, and this post describes this technique in more detail.

Forms - How to set the data source of a form to a collection

It can be difficult to build edit forms that are based on collections, because the designer disables the button to add fields to the form. This post describes this behaviour, and explains how we can configure an edit form to save and update rows in a collection.

Forms - The best practice for setting the data item on a form

When building apps, a 'best practice' is to minimise dependencies between screens. Therefore, it's best not to set the item property of a form to a value that's defined on a gallery (or some other control) outside of the screen. This post describes this topic in greater detail.

Data - How to make a copy of a record

A common requirement is to make a copy of a record, based on an existing record. This post describes some examples of how to carry out this task, including how to copy an existing record from a form, a gallery control, and how to write formula that copies the last created record.

SharePoint - How to export and import lists and maintain lookup relationships

A common requirement is to export and import sets of SharePoint lists, and to maintain the lookup data. This post describes how to carry out this task.

Search - How to filter by multiple fields and return all records when no search term is entered

When adding search capabilities to an app, a very common requirement is to enable users to search by multiple fields and to return all records if no search criteria is entered. This post describes how to carry out this task.