From the course: Power Apps: Building Data-Driven Apps

Link O365 tools in new ways

From the course: Power Apps: Building Data-Driven Apps

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Link O365 tools in new ways

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- [Instructor] So, what do you need to make this stuff work right? Who's going to be able to benefit from the techniques that we'll talk about in this course. Well, the big focus of the course is using PowerApps as a front end to provide an easy, user-friendly way of capturing data that can be manipulated in Excel. So naturally the ones who will be the most rewarded are the people responsible for collecting and analyzing that data. But with improved data integrity, a simpler input experience, and mobile capabilities, really anyone who touches the data is going to get some benefit. Now as far as this course goes, the first step you'll want to do is check to make sure that you have PowerApps. You should see it listed on your Office 365 home page. Now you might have to click Show all apps to see it. If it's not listed, you need to speak to your Office administrator. They may not have chosen to enable it for your company. Although Excel online in O 365 is pretty impressive, it doesn't necessarily have all of the features. Now this means that at least part of the time, you will probably want to open the desktop application, which means that you will have to have that installed. Typically when you first open the Office online application in desktop mode, if you don't already have it, you'll be prompted to download and install it at that time. Now these downloads are very large, and it can take hours on slower connections. So it's a really good idea to do this in advance. But this is also something that has some dependencies on your license and what features of O 365 your administrator has enabled. Once again, if you don't see an option to download the Office desktop apps, you'll need to have a conversation with your admin. Not having all the tools available may put some limitations on just how much of these powerful opportunities you'll be able to take advantage of. By the way, I just want to mention that Excel is not the only possible data source that you can use with PowerApps. PowerApps has the ability to connect with a multitude of Microsoft and third party databases. Some of the details will differ, but in general, the things we'll look at in this class widely apply to other data sources as well. And just a little scope setting, it probably won't surprise you to hear that PowerApps is a very feature-rich and multi-layered tool. Now since I'm focusing on a specific purpose, using PowerApps as a front end for data and predominantly Excel data at that, there are wide areas of the tool that we won't touch on. I think the information we'll be looking at is extremely useful, but I make no claims that this course is comprehensive. If you want a deeper dive into PowerApps, there are some great courses in the online library. In particular, I want to point you to Gini von Courter's Learning Microsoft PowerApps and Bill Kulterman's Microsoft PowerApps Essentials Training: Beyond the Basics.

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