1. 5, 7-10. Identify required Power Platform components
Hello. And in this section what we’re going to do is just have a look at the rest of the requirements for the PL 100 exam and to be honest, most of the rest of the requirements we can do very quickly. You will already know all that you need to know. So first of all, determine the required Power apps. Well if you are going to ask for information then you’re probably using a Power app. As a Power automated is more to do with flaws. You can request information at the start of a Power Automate floor but then the question is do you want to use a canvas app where everything has to be pixel perfect so you want to be able to put things exactly in the right place?
Or are you using a model driven app which is dependent on the views, the charts, the forms, the dashboards that you create from data in the database. Identify existing resources and licenses. Obviously you would know what existing resources you got and existing licenses. You know that PowerApps costs $10 per user per app per month or $40 for the unlimited plan per user per month. You’ve also got access to the developer plan as well, but that can only be used for development and not factual production.
You’ve also got Power Automate licensing the per user plan being $15 per user per month. You can also add robotic process automation and you can also license by floor and Power bi can also be licensed as a free version. And then there is one where you can share all of your visualizations, your dashboards, your apps. So that’s $10 per user per month or you can go for the premium so that’s $20 per user per month or a premium capacity of around $5,000 per month upwards. Now some of these may also be included in other Microsoft 365 packages.
Identify the gaps between existing functionality and requirements. So you obviously have a problem. What is the problem, where is the gap? See where that problem is in terms of how Power platform can solve it. So is it to do with automation in which case go for Power Automate? Maybe people need to enter things in the right order in which case you might have a business process rule or maybe there are some things which are needed in sometimes and sometimes not. So that could be a business rule. Identify the required business processes.
Well, hopefully the above will have got you to that. And then evaluate accelerators, Microsoft apps and services and third party solutions accelerators things that can get you to your end goal more quickly. So things like templates for instance, microsoft app and services. So maybe using Microsoft teams to host your apps so they can be more integrated with channels and third party solutions. Well, we had a look at one third party solution for developing JSON and we previously had a look at describing connectors including standard premium and custom connectors. So generally premium are those things that would cost money in the outside world on a monthly or annual license.
It also includes a data verse database. Custom are things you design and standard, things that are generally free on an open basis or powered by Microsoft 365 or the Power platform. So this is all you need to know in terms of identifying the required power platform components. And having gone through this course, you should be fairly confident in being able to do all of this.
2. 16, 17. Design User Interface
In this video we’re going to have a look at design user interface so identify opportunities for component reuse. So if you have got the same sort of thing for instance, you saw we had a calculator, a calculator could be reused multiple times. You saw that we could create them in a component and in fact add them into a components library. And then we’ve got this black box of code order that we’ve already worked on and we can then feed input parameters and output values. So basically anything that you can reuse then that saves you time.
Maybe you’ve got a screen that you can reuse elsewhere in the application. Now apply user interface standards. This is a bit odd because there apparently is something called the PowerApps User Interface Design Guidelines. However, it doesn’t seem to exist anymore. It is missing surprisingly since this is a Microsoft product.
So given the absence of these UI standards, I suggest that when you have a look at an app you make sure for instance, that there is a consistent color standard throughout it, that you have got everything that needs to be visible. Visible. The end user is not having to hunt down particular things. That is fairly useful. You might also want to create a video guide and that could again be a separate screen. You can insert the video as media design for accessibility we’re going to look at in the next video.
Design for localization. Well, we have previously seen that formulas in canvas apps can be quite different. You can see the difference here between all of these yellow highlighted areas. However, there are additional things that you might want to consider. For example, you could have different strings for different languages. So. Hello. And Italian chow, for instance. And you can put those into a collection for instance and use the lookup function to look up.
For instance in this case it’s the hello string and what language you’re in. So you can see that this is one way of being able to localize the language. Additionally, you can also format numbers, dates and text. So quite often all of these different formulas will have an optional locale. So for instance here I’m putting in the Spain locale or here the United States or here the France and so it returns it based on those different locales.
And we’ve got four key functions all ending with value. Value converts a number in a string to a number value date value converts date time value converts a time and date time value converts a date and time in the string to a date time value. So, apart from accessibility, which we are going to have looked at in the next video, those are some things that you need to know about when looking at designing the user interface.
3. 19-21. Design reporting
In this video, we’re going to have a look at the design output section. So, first of all, design the data output requirements. So you’ve decided you’re going to create this app or this floor, and the question is, what do you want from it? So this could be developed on paper, it could be developed in PowerPoint, it could be developed in Excel spreadsheet, it could even be developed in something like Visio. If you are going to design a full floor chart out of I want this, these are the steps that they go through.
You might also be using things like business rules and business process flaws to get there. This is a good stage to go through before you implement it in Power apps, because you need to have a full idea of this is what I want. And then if you want to simplify it into various stages, so you can say, well, this is my stage one app and then I’ll expand it to my stage two app.
Once you’ve got those ideas, then you can start designing. Well, define requirements for visualizations. Very important, because for instance, we’ve seen that canvas apps have got relatively few charts. So you’ve got a column chart, a line chart and a pie chart. For everything else, you need to have a Power Bi tile. So for that, Power Bi would need a connection, say, to the databasee, and then you design it and then you can bring it into your Power app. For model driven charts, again, the Ranger charts is a bit better, but not as huge as in the Power Bi.
So we have got column bar, area, line pi, so similar to what we’ve got in the Canvas app. We’ve also got funnel, tag and donut donut being a pie with a hole in the middle. So again, you may need Power Bi towers. And we’ve had a look at how we can embed reports and dashboards into model driven apps. If we go to Power Bi, you can see we’ve got many more visualizations, including gauges maps, tree maps, and we can use Slices cards, multi raw cards.
We’ve also got the funnels, as we’ve seen in the model driven apps. But basically we’ve got access to many more different types of visualization and then finally identify repositories for analytical data. So where are you going to put it? Well, you might put it into the database, it’s native to the Power platform, or you might put it into Azure. So you might put it into a database, you might put it into Blob storage, you might put it anywhere, but wherever it is, ideally it shouldn’t be on your computer. If it is, then you’ll need a gateway to get there and that just has complexity. If it’s online, however, it will be accessible 24/7. So these are some considerations when we are designing output.
4. 55. Create and monitor approvals from Microsoft SharePoint
In this video, we’re going to have a look at SharePoint. So I’ll go to Office. com and click on SharePoint if you’ve got the appropriate license. Now, we’re just going to have a look in the sense of seeing what we can do in terms of Power Automate, approvals and other flaws. So I’m going to create a new site. So this site is going to be a team site and it’s going to be code SharePoint here 100. So click next. And who do I want to add? Well, I’m going to add Power Platform Plan as an owner, so I can add additional members as well if I so wish. So now I’ve got this site, I’m going to create a new list within that site. So a blank list. So this is my PL 100 list. So in my list, what I can do is I can add new items. So I’ll click on the plus here. And so here’s my first item and my second item.
And you can see we can also add attachments as well. Now, suppose this was a sort of list where I need an approval to add an item. Well, I can do this. Now, we have got two things here. First of all, we’ve got Automate. I can create a rule based on when a column changes, when a particular value changes, when a new item is created, and when a new item is deleted. You can notify somebody. But I want to do more than just notifying. I want to have approval. So what I can do is I can integrate and I can integrate either power apps or power automate. So I’m going to create a floor and this floor is going to be the start approval when a new item is added.
So you can see there’s an awful lot of templates that you can use. And I’m going to click on this particular item so we can see what it needs. SharePoint office 365 and approvals. Now, at this stage, make sure you’ve got the right connectors, the right permissions. You can add new connections by clicking on the dot, dot dot and notice you can also connect to certain places using an on premises data gateway. So if I was connecting to a SharePoint on my local network, for instance, I can do that. So all of these are fine. I’ll click Continue and it’s going to create this from a template. And it’s quite a big template, as you can see.
So let’s just have a quick look down it. When a new item is created, I want to start an approval. Now, you need an assigned too. So I’m going to put in my power platform plan person. So if it is successful, if the approval is successful, then if I have approved it, I can inform the item creator of the approval. If not, I inform the item creator of its rejection. So that’s a condition. Now, we’ve also got this other path here and you can see the little I next to it.
And I’ve also got this red dot, this dashed line. So let’s have a look at what this does. So this views my get profile but only under certain conditions. Now if I click on the dot and go to configure run after, you can see that these conditions are when start an approval, the previous step has failed. So if it’s failed then it goes down this route which sends an email saying that the approval action has failed.
If however an approval has started. Now this is irrespective of whether I approve or reject the request. It’s just if it started. So if that previous step is successful then I can do this. Now clicking on the dot dot next to this and going to Configure run after can be quite useful for error checking. For instance, you can see if something has failed then send an email if it’s timed out, if it’s skipped. So all of that very useful. So the only thing I needed to do in all of this was to put in the assigned to. So I’ve got this start approval when a new item is added flow.
So I’m going to save that okay, recommend you test it while I’m going to test it by going back into my SharePoint and adding a new item. So here is my third item and I’m going to click Save. So it seems that nothing has happened. But bear in mind this is an automatic flow. So when a new item is created and also bear in mind it doesn’t necessarily happen instantaneously if I go back to the previous page. So my floor is ready to go. You can see it is running and has been running for 7 seconds and is currently at the send at the approval stage.
Now if I go into my Microsoft teams for my Power platform plan so the approver, you can see that in the approvals app I have please review third item. And in fact a notification came down here as well. So I’m going to click on that and am I going to accept or reject it. So this is fine. Approve. So submitting my response and while it’s doing that, there the status will change to approved. And you can see we have gone through this condition. We haven’t gone through any of this condition. So all of this path has an eggs next to it because we’ve not actually done it. So now what’s happened for the condition was true because I approved it. So inform item creator of the approval.
So now if I go into Outlook. com and sign in, you can see that my third item has been approved in the comments. This is fine. So this is how we can manage. That is to say create and monitor approvals from SharePoint. So there are lots of different type of approvals you can do. For instance, if I go back to power automate. You can see that you can request approval for a selected item. So I can click an item and then go to Automate and I would have, as you can see, request sign off is one of the default floors that are there, but I would have my own ones there.
Additionally, what you can do with SharePoint, you can also create rules so that somebody can be notified when a column changes, a certain value changes, an item is created and an item is deleted. But there are many, many more things you can do with Power Automate in SharePoint. So if you use SharePoint, why not have a look at the list of templates you can use? And if you haven’t got SharePoint, then why not go to Power Automate, go to Templates and search the templates for SharePoint so you know what can be done.
