Preface

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you and thank you for choosing this book. With Learn Microsoft PowerApps, you will learn how to build functional canvas apps and model-driven apps using the Microsoft PowerApps application. Throughout the book, you will not only learn about its components and what they do but also put them into practice by incrementally building an app through a number of labs.

The book itself endeavors to introduce new topics in each chapter, gradually introducing more and more of PowerApps' functionality to help you understand how you can continually improve your apps to build something that is just as powerful as a custom-built application.

The book is structured into four sections:

1. The first four chapters deal with the fundamentals of PowerApps, such as how to use the studio, how to publish, and how to create a basic app. This book is intended to be used by a number of different audiences; however, it assumes no prior understanding of what PowerApps is and how it works. Therefore, we will talk through how to set yourself up in terms of licensing, look at how you can install the apps, and then cover how to start to create basic apps.
2. The next four chapters build upon the basic understanding of PowerApps gained in section 1 and begin to address how to build functionality. These are the main chapters, where you will start to see your app take shape as we introduce the controls and look at how they can be used to achieve different effects within our apps. We'll also look at data and connectors to begin to build dynamic content into our apps.
3. Next, we'll begin to add a layer of complexity to our apps by diving into some of the more advanced functionality that you can use within PowerApps, including the ability to use GPS and barcodes to allow your users to do more with their app, especially when the app is being used on a mobile device. Within this section, we will also look at some of the more complex tasks, such as being able to provide offline capabilities as well as introducing security.
4. Finally, we'll look at model-driven apps. This is addressed separately as, commonly, canvas apps and model-driven apps have very different audiences and require development in drastically different ways.

Throughout the book, we will be building an app that relates to a fictional company called Griffton IT Solutions, and we will be using PowerApps to build an asset management app. In each chapter, we will build more and more functionality into the app to leverage each topic that we discuss and to allow you to put the techniques into practice. All of the files that are used within the labs can either be created manually or can be downloaded from the GitHub repository: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Microsoft-PowerApps.