The mobile version of Power Apps is likely to be the most common type of app you will create. It is extremely important for your users to be able to access and interact with data, regardless of where they are in the world. This is made possible through the use of a mobile device.

Often, when you create Power Apps, you will start from scratch. Templates are useful if you want to look at working examples and how to work within the scenarios that Microsoft provides out of the box, but as soon as you start building more bespoke apps, it will become much easier to start from a blank canvas.

Creating a blank app is exactly what it sounds like: you will have a completely blank canvas to start from. However, one screen will always be created by default.

Follow these steps to create a new blank phone app:

1. Access Power Apps by going to https://make.powerapps.com. Alternatively, navigate to the Office 365 portal (portal.office.com) and select Power...

The tablet version of Power Apps provides you with a larger canvas for building your app, one that allows you to create an app that works well on tablet devices as well as desktop browsers. However, the tablet rendition also has additional uses, as the larger size works well when creating apps that are embedded into SharePoint Online using the Power Apps web part, or to Microsoft Teams as a tab. As an example, you may have created a Power App to manage leave requests that is then placed on a page within a SharePoint intranet. The users would simply access the relevant page in the intranet, and the app would be rendered as part of the page. Using Power Apps within Teams will be covered in Chapter 4, Publishing and Leveraging Power Apps.

Creating a blank tablet app follows almost the same procedure as creating a mobile app:

1. To create a new blank tablet app, access Power Apps from https://make.powerapps.com. Alternatively, navigate to the Office 365...

One of the easiest customizations to make to your app is to change the basic settings that apply to your app. These settings cover four key areas:

• General
• Display
• Upcoming features
• Support

App settings can be accessed from the File menu, and also from the menu at the top of Power Apps Studio:

Figure 2.6: The Settings menu

The Settings dialog box appears in the center of the screen and allows us to select the settings group that we want to change. The first settings group is General.

Exploring the General settings

The General settings will allow you to modify the key settings that will affect the identity as well as some of the basic operations of the app studio. Let’s start by looking at the app’s identity.

Changing the name and description

When you develop an app, there will come a time where you may need to change its name, whether that’s because the app’s functionality...

In this lab, we are going to start building a Power App that will manage the groceries we have in our homes. The first thing we are going to do is create a blank canvas so that we can start populating it with components in Chapter 4, Publishing and Leveraging Power Apps. We will give our app a basic identity in terms of icon and color, and then save it to the cloud.

Creating a blank phone app

We are going to base our app on a mobile phone, so we will begin by creating our mobile app using the mobile canvas:

1. Log in to the Power Apps portal by navigating to https://make.powerapps.com. If you are prompted to log in, please do so using your username and password.
2. In the center of the screen, beneath Make your own app, click on Canvas app from blank:

Figure 2.12: Selecting the Canvas app from blank option

3. In the Create dialog box, select Blank canvas app

Figure 2.13: Creating blank canvas

4. In the Canvas app...

Within this chapter we have started to investigate the basics of creating a canvas app within Power Apps, which is the most common type of app created. We were able to create different apps for different types of devices, selecting either phone or tablet depending on which canvas is the most relevant for the devices we want to use.

We found that we can provide a unique identity for our apps, being able to define a name and a description to describe what our app is, and also giving the app a visual identity through the use of icons and colors. These are most visible in the Power Apps app, so it’s a good idea to make your apps as identifiable as possible to help your users find them.

Throughout the chapter we looked at the app settings, and investigated not only the dimensions of the app, but also some of the other app behaviors such as auto-scaling, aspect ratio, and app rotation so that we understand what these mean when we’re creating our apps.

We...

1. What are the two types of canvas that can be created within Power Apps?
2. Which canvas allows you to define custom dimensions?
3. Which app setting would you go to in order to change the icon of your app?
4. Which set of features should you test on a regular basis to ensure that your app will continue to work?
5. Which option should you set so that your app rotates when the device rotates?

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