Rajeev Pentyala – Technical Blog on Power Platform, Azure and AI

If you are new to PowerApps, please go through my previous blog

In this post, I am going to walk you through building an App using Excel as ‘Data Source’.

I am going to build an App by

• Prepare an Excel file with data formatted as ‘Table’
• Place it in ‘One Drive For Business’.

Pre-requisites:

• You must have a PowerApps account. Refer blog for details.
• An Excel sheet with data formatted as ‘Table’.
• ‘One Drive For Business’ account
  • This comes free with Dynamics 365 30 days trail.

Steps to configure Excel:

• Create an Excel file with some data. I prepared ‘Customer’ records with 4 columns.
• You should format this data as ‘Table’ as the PowerApp, only consider Tables, which you will notice in next sections.

• Provide name to the Table; We will use this Table name in ‘Power App’. I named my table as ‘Customers‘.

• Save the Excel

Steps to upload Excel to OneDrive:

• Login to http://portal.office.com

• Connect to ‘OneDrive’ and upload the Excel File

Steps to create App:

• Login to PowerApps Portal
• Create a New App with ‘OneDrive for Business’ template, as I uploaded the Excel to OneDrive.

• Note: Its not necessary that you should pick ‘OneDrive for Business’ template, you can even create a ‘Blank app’ and create ‘OneDrive’ connection.
• Click ‘Create’ to establish App’s connection with ‘OneDrive For Business’.

• Choose the Excel file

• Select the ‘Table’ and click ‘Connect’; This table ‘Customers‘ is nothing but the table name we given in ‘Excel sheet’.

• Now you would experience the power of ‘Power Apps’ as it instantly come up with UI using the excel data. App auto create 3 screens for Browse Screen,Details Screen and Edit Screen.

• You can reorder the columns by selecting ‘Data’ or you can change the ‘Sort Column’ if you want.
• Finally, press F5 to run the App.

Refer my previous blog to build a simple calculator App.

🙂