Microsoft Power Apps

What differentiates Microsoft Power Apps from other similar products?

Breadth of Capabilities

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

Customization of app development.

What do you dislike most about this product?

Extremely Steep Learning Curve. Hard to just build a basic app to collect data without first thinking 10 steps ahead to ensure data integrity, performance of app, etc. Also, there are limitations on what items are automated and what require manual maintenance. Between the two, there are limitations on what functions and formulas can be applied. Also, the best practices of App Dev aren't in place such as Dev & Prod environments, having ability for multiple users working on different components of the app, etc. Pricing is constantly changing so I'd add about 20% on top of whatever the current price is to account for future price changes.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

Do your due diligence and work with a certified professional who can either help in the due diligence process and/or get your team up to speed on development or else they will be fumbling around trying to figure out the best approach. If you don't, you'll wind up having to redesign the app down the road and likely spend twice the amount of time and loss in productivity. Another consideration is that currently (as of 2022) only one person can edit a single app a time so if you have teams, this will be a constraint to the dev process. Finally, there isn't a way to create a Dev & Prod version of the app due to PowerApps auto generating each URL.

What differentiates Microsoft Power Apps from other similar products?

I don't find any other product like Microsoft Power Apps. It is a small package with Many big tools that help me to process faster with tasks.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

Power Tools provides many solutions like long screenshot, OCR, Text Replace, Rename In batch etc. Among all I mainly use OCR for older documents. OCR function will scan and convert to text that I can use with other documents like excel and word.

What do you dislike most about this product?

There are small training videos available within app when we hover mouse on them but I think that is not enough for first time user. They should also include detailed training videos for every tool.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

I will recommend this if you want to use multiple tools in a single application.

What differentiates Microsoft Power Apps from other similar products?

It integrates very well with Sharepoint, which is our main use case. Some forms for Lists need more complex requirements, and Power Apps is the perfect fit for this. We've also used it for displaying other content on Sharepoint sites.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

Once the learning curve is overcome, it's quite easy to work with and personalize more complex forms for Sharepoint Lists. The flexibility and customization options are incredible for a product that is included with our 365 licensing we use. We are very impressed.

What do you dislike most about this product?

The learning curve was a bit steep, so this is not something end users can use effectively. But, a training course helped clear up any confusion and it's easy enough to look up how to do things and it's much easier to use.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

Give this a try if you use Sharepoint. Just make sure to take a training course or two, or have patience while getting used to how the interface and data lookups work. It can be daunting at first, but it just takes time to learn how things work.