Blog - Recent Posts

Settings - Old Layout vs New Layout (2021)

The settings area has now received a new look! Let's compare how the new look compares against the old, including a nostalgic look at what it contained, way back in 2017.

SQL - How can we count rows accurately?

With SQL Server, the Count and CountRow functions produce delegation warnings. Without these functions, does it make it impossible to count records from large SQL Server tables? The answer is no! In this post, I'll describe a trick that enables us to carry out this task.

SQL - Have you seen these Power Platform options in SQL Azure portal?

From the SQL Azure Portal, there is now the option to create a Power App ontop of a SQL Table. Here's a closer look at this feature.

SharePoint - Beware of numeric calculated columns!

Help! - my numbers don't format correctly or they appear with loads of trailing numbers. If we encounter this problem, a likely cause is a bug that affects SharePoint calculated columns. This post examines this issue in more detail.

SharePoint – 2 Mistakes to avoid when importing Excel data

At some point, many app builders want to use the SharePoint feature to import Excel data into a new list. There's a 'knack' to doing this and in this post, I'll describe the settings to make this process as smooth as possible.

Settings - What does the Delayed Load setting do?

What does the delayed load setting do? In short, it improves the speed of our apps, particularly the start-up time. In this post, we'll examine traces to prove that this feature actually works, and find out why it's important to take heed of the 'inefficient delay loading' warnings that the 'app checker tool' identifies, to help us take full advantage of performance benefits that delayed load offers.

What to do when some part your app breaks, or starts behaving differently?

Why doesn't my app work today?? If your app worked fine yesterday and suddenly stops, or works differently today, it's possible that an update to Power Apps has broken your app. If this happens to you, here's what you can try to restore your app to a working state.

5 Tips for when you can't sign into Power Apps

It can be so frustrating when some obscure error prevents us from logging into Power Apps! If we find ourselves in this position, here are 5 things we can try to resolve the problem.

Forms - How to conditionally make form fields mandatory

How can we apply conditional validation to a form - for example, if the status is closed, a closed date must be entered? In this post, we'll look at a quick and simple way to add this type of conditional, mandatory field validation to a form.

SQL - Don't let this DateTime bug catch you out!

With SQL Server, there is a bug that prevents us from filtering datetime columns with equality operators. All SQL Server app builders should be aware of, and this post describes the behaviour of this bug in more detail, including workarounds to the problem.

Settings - What's the purpose of the "Explicit Column Selection" Setting?

The "Explicit Column Selection" setting improves the performance of our apps. But how exactly does it work, and what problems can it cause? This post describes the setting in more detail, including demonstrations of behaviour with traces.

10 Great Ideas to Improve Power Apps

In this post, I review the Power Apps ideas forum and I highlight 10 great ideas that I think would make a big improvement to the product.

What Power App features can we expect in 2021?

With 2021 just begining, here are my predictions on some of the features that may appear in 2021.

Top New Power App Features from 2020

2020 was a great year for Power Apps, with many new features and additions. In this post, I summarise some the top features that were added in 2020.

Formulas - Generating Row Numbers - Part 2

Here's a technique to display row numbers against a sorted set of data in a gallery control.