There may be times that you or your team members are spending a lot of time managing tedious administration tasks and company data. Chances are you may have thought of how documentation automation will boost efficiency in your organisation, facilitate lean delivery and improve business agility. However, you do not know coding or you do not want to spend much budget on software development. Here, I have a solution for you.
Microsoft PowerApps is a solution to connect, create and share business apps with your team on any device in minutes. Without coding, an app is generated based on your data source, and connected to your database, so that you and your team can collaborate, access and manage data, anytime, anywhere, and most importantly in the way that fit your business needs.
We will be building a TimeSheet App, which allows team members create and enter timesheets, directly to our database, to record their time spent on projects.
This very first post of this series will show you the setup and build the first App, connecting to our database. All you need is a browser, internet access, and data!
- Go to https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/ and sign up.
- Once sign up, you are at the PowerApps homepage. And ready to begin develop your tailored App for your business need. You can download Powerapps Studio to your desktop, which is available on the top right hand corner. But for this post, create the app on the web. Let’s look at few options on the left.
- Go to Apps on the left, you can see a collection of sample Apps for you to customise according to your needs. This time, we are building our TimeSheet App from scratch.
- One of the way to add your data source is on the left, choose “Connections” and then you can click “New Connection” to add your data source.
- You will be able to choose to connect to a variety of data source. Once you chose your data source, just click “+”.
It is indeed a very long list. You can choose from Dropbox, Gdrive, SQL database, JIRA, GitHub, gotomeeting, etc. Very likely you can connect to what you need.
- This time we are using another way to add our data source. At the time when we are creating our new app, just click “+ New app” button on bottom left
- Choose your data source. We are using our Microsoft Azure Cloud host SQL database this time
- Choose the data table that you are working on. We are adding new timesheet to our database so timesheet table is chosen, and click “Connect”.
Just in a moment, an App, tailored to your data source, is generated.
Isn’t it magical? This App is connected to data source, so you can see existing records in the data table. In the coming posts, we will talk more on the working environment and customising functionalities.
Stay tuned!
