Blog - Recent Posts

Certifications - How to renew Miorcosoft certifications for 12 months

To maintain the validity of Microsoft certifications, it's necessary to complete a renewal assessment every 12 months. What's this process like? This post summarises the process that I followed when I recently completed this task.

Formula - How to display a count of grouped non-blank and blank rows

If you need to produce a count of non-blank rows, this post walks through an example scenario and highlights the use of the little-known function, CountA.

What's new in the updated Maker Portal navigation menu? A comparison of Old vs New

The Power Apps Maker Portal has been refreshed with a new left-hand navigation menu. This post describes what's new and compares the old menu with the new.

User Group - UK Reading Dynamics365 and Power Platform User Group Meetup Dates 2023

If you're in England and local to the Thames Valley region, here are the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform User Group meetup dates for 2023.

Controls - How to set height of nested galleries dynmically

When working with sets of nested galleries, it may be necessary to specify a variable height for each instance of a child gallery in order to avoid empty white space or scrollbars. This post provides an example of how to carry out this task.

2023 Release Wave 1 - The 5 best new features planned for Power Apps 2023

The 2023 Release Wave 1 plan describes Power Platform features that are scheduled for release between April 2023 and September 2023. What features have been planned for Power Apps? In this post, I summarise the notable enhancements that are planned for Power Apps.

Power App Makers can now create up to 3 Developer Environments per user!

Microsoft has improved the developer experience by allowing up to 3 developer environments per user. This post describes this new preview feature in more detail.

Save the Date - Powerful Devs Conference February 15 2023

If you're a developer and you want to learn how to better leverage the Power Platform, I recommend that you register for the upcoming Powerful Devs conference.

First UK Reading Dynamics 365 & Power Platform User Group meeting

Find out what happened at the first Reading UK Dynamics 365 and Power Platform User Group meetup in Reading, England.

Dataverse - How to create Entity Relationship diagrams

Entity relationship diagrams can help us visualise and better understand the schema of a database. In this post, we look at how to create an ER diagram for a set of Dataverse tables.

Data - How to group data in a gallery and calculate sums

When displaying records in a gallery, it can be very helpful to show the sums of values. This post provides a walk-through on how to carry out this task.

Dataverse - How you can more quickly bulk update data using the SQL language

If you need to want to update records in a Dataverse database using SQL commands, one way to carry this out is to use XrmToolBox and the SQL4CDS plugin. This post provides a summary of how this works.

Dataverse - How to fix the bug in the 'Business Rules' editor that prevents numeric values from saving

When there is a mismatch between the language of Dataverse and the language of the editor, business rules can fail to save with an error that looks like this - 'Enter a value from -922,337,203,685,477.00 through 922.337,203,685,477.00'. This post describes a workaround for this issue.

Training - List of Virtual Training Day Events in January and February 2023

Here's a list of Microsoft Virtual Training Day events in January and February 2023 - ideal if you're looking for some free online Power Platform learning.

Barcodes - How to scan barcodes - a summary of the 3 available barcode scanning controls

Power Apps provides 3 different controls for scanning barcodes. How do these controls differ and what are the circumstances in which we would use each control? Read this post to find out more.