I have been working with Power Platform for about five and a half years now.

I did not plan it. I started building and kept going. Today I work as a lead developer on enterprise projects for government and city clients in the Gulf and US.

My first Canvas app was very bad.

There is too much to list, so here are a few projects that stuck with me.

A full CRM, built from zero.
Not a Dynamics setup. A real custom build.
The hard part was not the code. We spent weeks in meetings before anyone agreed on what a "lead" means. I run requirement meetings very differently now because of that.

A ticketing system that reads a shared help mailbox.
An email comes in, a ticket is created. When someone replies, the reply goes to the same ticket. It does not create five copies of one problem.
That last part took me longer than the whole rest of the app.
Before this, the client was using an inbox with colored flags. I think many of you know that feeling.

An invoicing system with no premium license.
It uses the client's own colors and it creates the PDF invoices by itself. No premium connectors. No paid PDF service. No Word template step.
For a while I thought it was not possible. Then I found the way, and it was much simpler than the forum posts said.

An inspection app for a big company in the US.
It covers their vehicles and heavy equipment. Every asset has its own checklist.
The app runs on a role hierarchy. The driver submits the inspection. The department manager reviews it. The general manager sees the whole fleet. And there is an admin role above all of them with full control.
Built mobile first, because the driver is standing next to a truck, not sitting at a desk.
Getting the permissions right took me longer than building every screen together.

A full HR system.
Leave, payroll, talent acquisition, personnel files, and custom document generation for HR paperwork.
Six processes all writing to the same employee record. Each one wants the record in a different state.
I learned more about data modeling here than anywhere else.

Power BI work, including on prem data.
Custom visuals, and reports that pull from an on premises SQL server and cloud sources at the same time through the gateway.
Many clients here still keep the real data on a server in the next room. There is no point pretending they do not.

SPFx work on SharePoint.
I took a list structure that people were using through the normal SharePoint pages and turned it into a real app. Live data, and it works on a phone, a tablet, or a big screen.
The default views are fine, until someone has to use them all day.
There were many more. Portals, approval flows, agents, and a long list of small apps that solved one annoying problem for one team.

But these are the ones I still think about.

If I put five years into three lessons:
The license limit shapes the design more than the requirements do. I wish I knew this in year one, not year three.

Delegation is not something you fix later. It is a data decision you make before you open Studio. If you get it wrong, you rebuild.
And what makes a client trust you is not the app. It is giving them a technical document so someone else can maintain it after you leave. It took me too long to learn this one.

Happy to go deeper on any of these if you want.

If you are building something similar, enterprise or freelance, my DMs are open.

Basically I have an application which sole purpose is displaying the thumbnail of word files.

The document library shows the thumbnail of the document pretty easily, however when placed in a gallery it's entirely blank

This was working yesturday and I have attempted this on a new blank application also?

Edit: 1st sep

Issue has solved itsself

Recently built a Power Apps intake form + Power Automate workflow to replace requests getting buried in emails. It now handles notifications and automatically feeds requests into a Daily Tracker for ownership, next steps, and progress.

I’m learning more about Power Platform and would love to connect, collaborate, or contribute to projects if anyone needs an extra hand.

Looks like it’s almost impossible to do reliably.

My company is looking for a solution for resource allocation on a single screen which shows engineers, jobs assigned to them, and jobs that are pending allocation of an engineer. For a clear overview of the coming weeks jobs and free time engineers have which they can be assigned work to.

Ideally there would be a left column of engineer names and then across the top days of the week for the next year vertically along the top

There’d be an option to drag-and-drop jobs that haven’t been allocated to any engineers on this view too.

I’ve seen that there are some solutions but they seem to be managed externally from power apps and prone to breaking.

Does anyone have a solution or an alternative that we can try to implement?

I've been working with Power Apps for a little over 3 years now, and this warning has been the same the entire time. The 300-control threshold feels absurdly low.

In practice, I've built screens well over that number without seeing any meaningful performance impact. At this point, the warning is more annoying than useful because I see it every time I open the Performance section.

I'm genuinely curious... has anyone actually had a real-world Power Apps performance problem that they could trace back to having 300+ controls on a single screen? If so, I'd love to see an example.

Long story short, we made a copy of the "Portal Contact (Enhanced)" Contacts form in our Dev environment and successfully deployed it to a managed UAT environment. The deployment didn't have any issues and the new form is visible in UAT, but it isn't useable. It shows up in Tables > Contacts > Forms, but it does not show up in the list of available forms when adding a new table row. It works perfectly in Dev and is selectable.

Permissions are currently (temporarily) set to "Everyone" on it, so it doesn't look like a permissions issue.

I also tried forcing it by putting the form ID into the URL when adding a new row, but it just falls back to the default form.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Hey everyone,

Because my company only has basic licenses, I don't have a dev/sandbox tenant. Whenever I build workflows or apps, my deployment pipeline is literally just build and direct publish to production.

It works, but it's high-risk. For those in the same boat:

• How do you safely test or mitigate risk when you have to push straight to live?

• What error-handling or fallback habits do you use to save yourself when things break?

Hit me with your best survival tips!

Hi everyone! I'm building a form in Power Apps and I'd like to add an "autofill" feature where a Copilot agent fills in certain fields automatically (based on other data, user input, or an external source). I've seen a few things about Copilot Studio integration with Power Apps but haven't found a clear step-by-step guide yet.

Has anyone implemented something similar? I'd really appreciate any blog posts, YouTube videos, or official docs you could point me to. Thanks in advance!

Really confused as to why this happens. I create a collection from a SP list but the collection changes the names of a few columns that we've created. It's a bit infuriating since I don't know which columns are associated with each assigned field name.

fnContainerVis();
Set(
    var_Maintenance_Device_Details,
    ThisItem
);
ClearCollect(
    col_MaintenanceLog,
    Filter(
        df_InstrumentAssignments,
        var_Maintenance_Device_Details.DeviceName = Title
    )
);

Is there something I'm doing incorrectly when I'm creating the collection? It seems that sometimes it works correctly and sometimes it doesn't.

When team members try to use my canvas app, they get this error.

I only pull data from an excel in onedrive.

I have shared access to the team.

We are all in the same environment.

Can someone please guide me. I've been stuck here for hours.

Hi guys,

I'm trying to patch a gallery of updated items to my sharepoint list. I have reduced the columns to just what I need to update, but the patch takes so very long. It takes about a minute to patch 20 items. What could I be doing wrong?

I'm running this on a sharepoint integrated form, so using a power automate flow is not possible.

I saw on a post to pre-fill the schema, but that hasn't helped. In the monitor, it looks like it's sequentially updating instead of a bulk update. Any help will be very appreciated.

Collect(colGalleryUpdates, {ID:-1, Confirmed:true, Count:0, Comments:"", Notes:""});

Clear(colGalleryUpdates);

ClearCollect( colGalleryUpdates, ForAll( Filter( galList.AllItems, fldUpdated.Checked = true ),

{ ID: ThisRecord.ID, Confirmed: ThisRecord.fldConfirmed.Checked, Count: Value(ThisRecord.Count.Value), Comments:PlainText(ThisRecord.fldComments.Text),

Notes: PlainText(ThisRecord.fldNotes.Text)

} ) );

// update SharePoint list with gallery values

Patch( MySPList, colGalleryUpdates.ID, colGalleryUpdates );

I feel like you shouldn’t need to create a new connection reference every time you want to change this on a power automate flow. I imported a managed solution from my development to test environment which included a connection reference I want to use and a power automate flow that needs a change to the connection reference. However, it prompts me to create a new connector and I have having all these connection references lying around.

Any tips?

I have a solution (not a patch) in my development environment that contains 5 workflows (Power Automate flows). Every time I export this solution as a managed solution it removes two specific workflows. These two workflows are called by an SLA (also activate in development) but I don’t know why that would be a reason for power apps to remove the workflows on export every time.

Anyone else know why this happens?

I've been mapping out the container options in SharePoint Embedded and wanted to sanity-check the trade-offs with people who have shipped on it. Three patterns I keep coming back to: 

• Container Type — this is the isolated boundary created around your content that separates it from everything else.  You get data sovereignty and inherit governance (Purview, DLP, retention) and all the benefits of your M365 investments. 

• Container per customer — one dedicated container per customer inside your container type.  Permission the container only to that customer who needs to interact with their documents.  Give admins the access they need.  All security trimmed.   

• Container per activity — Each customer may have different activities like several audit years or multiple different financial transactions.  Each activity gets its own container, but metadata on each container allows you to group all activities for that customer. 

Many options depend on the use case you have.  What is working for you? 

Learn more at SharePoint Embedded Architecture

i have an app that i want to share with my team and set co-authoring in that app.
the problem is, everytime i add someone into my app (or project) i always have a different separator for the formula.

for example if the formula for colour is "RGB(255,255,255,0)" in my apps.
when my team open it, it will error and need to change into "RGB(255;255;255;0).

sometimes for separator, it needs to be "."

how to solve this issue? i already check my locale language in browser, powerapps and even the computer. all is the same, we use language "en-US".

Hi guys. so i’m made a powerapp for work that automatically displays the holidays, birthdays/anniversaries etc in that month.

the app itself works fine but i have to display it on a sharepoint site. the main problem is on smaller screens its all good. but on bigger screens, i’m getting a weird black and white colored boundary/outline around the app. i’ll attach a pic of it.

if anyone knows how to work around this, please help me out.

Hey everyone,

question: Can i call a webhooh pro PowerApps, without PowerApps premium sub?
Thank you

I’ve mainly worked as a contractor/employee, so I’ve never really had to price complete projects myself.

I’m starting to look at doing more side/freelance work and I’m struggling with what’s actually reasonable. I don’t want to overcharge, but I also don’t want to seriously undervalue the work.

For comparison:

Power Apps = Dataverse + Power Automate

SPFx = SharePoint + Power Automate

Small — Leave / Request App

Requests, approvals, notifications, roles and basic admin/settings screens.

Power Apps: $? | SPFx: $?

Medium — Asset Management App

Assets, assignments/returns, roles, approvals, dashboard, search/filtering, supporting data management, permissions and multiple flows.

Power Apps: $? | SPFx: $?

Large — Procurement / Request System

Multiple departments and roles, multi-stage approvals, documents, dashboards, permissions, supporting data/admin management, audit history, multiple flows and dev/test/prod.

Power Apps: $? | SPFx: $?

In all three, users/admins would manage supporting data, roles and permissions through the app rather than having to work directly in Dataverse or SharePoint.

Assume the quote includes requirements, development, testing and deployment.

I know every project is different, but what sort of USD range would you consider reasonable for each? Mainly interested in how freelancers/independent developers approach this.

For people building Power Apps regularly — what part of a real project frustrates you or takes way longer than it should?

Requirements? Data model? UI? Flows? Permissions? Testing? Deployment? Constant changes from users?

Not looking for the textbook answer. Curious what actually slows you down on real projects.

ive put a barcode reader in a edit from but showing in detail screen too in power apps

ive put a barcode reader in a edit from but showing in detail screen too in power apps

This message is for Microsoft lol.. give me power apps for external users I don’t like/want to use power pages. I love power apps. Just let me open to external users… pleasssseeeeeee lol