Microsoft Power Platform – 5 Days

Module 1: An introduction to Microsoft PowerApps

Let’s get started with an introduction to Microsoft PowerApps. Traditionally building customized solutions for a business involved using a coding language to build an application from scratch. Typically, these solutions could often only be used within the business, making external use of the application a large hurdle to overcome. With PowerApps we can now not only easily build solutions, but we can also share them with users in our business. Deployment takes seconds and you could by testing your own app on your phone in no time. This module will overview the features of PowerApps, its benefits to a business and the variety of ways you can build and access your apps on different devices.

Topics Covered

• What is PowerApps?
• The benefits of apps
• How to get to PowerApps
• Canvas Apps and Model-Driven Apps
• License Options and Costs

Module 2: Getting started with PowerApps

To begin our journey through the PowerApps product, we will begin by looking at some of the templates that are available to view and edit. Microsoft’s templates are a good starting point to discover what the product is capable off and how it can be achieved. We will also take the chance to have a tour of the editor so that students are familiar with the interface that they will be using over the two-day course. We will then build our first app from a static data source, showing students how to test their changes in the app instantly without the need to publish. We will also discuss how to configure your apps settings and how to access the app once it has been saved and shared.

Topics Covered

• Discover PowerApps with templates
• Building a new app with a data source
• Add, edit and remove controls
• Testing an app
• App settings
• Publish and share an app
• Mobile app

Module 3: Branding and Media

In our next module, we will look at the options available to designers that allow them to implement their business branding. Not only will this deal with the aesthetics of your app, it will also introduce time-saving tips to help keep your branding consistent. We will also be discussing how to embed media into your app which can be useful if you are planning on an app that might promote video content.

Topics Covered

• Linking control properties
• Backgrounds
• Colours and transparency
• Duplicating screens
• Copying the look and feel
• Using images
• Embed and play audio and video

Module 4: PowerApp Controls

So far in the course, we would have covered the basics of adding, editing and removing controls from our applications. The drive behind this module is to provide more depth on the categories of controls which can be used on a form. Your instructor will take you through each control and discuss its purpose and configuration. Tackling the wide selection of controls will help students recognise when to use the right control.

Topics Covered

• Labels
• Buttons
• Text inputs
• Controls
• Galleries
• Data tables
• Forms
• Media
• Charts
• Icons

Module 5: Data Sources and Logic

To help maintain and view essential business information, organisations often have a diverse selection of locations to keep different types of data. This could range from databases to file storage locations. PowerApps offers connections to a wide selection of data sources. We will show students to build their PowerApps to bring in data from a variety of sources as well as how they can utilise the common data source, a storage location unique to PowerApps.

Topics Covered

• Working with files
• Databases
• Filter, sort and search formulas
• If and Select
• Accessing on-premises sources
• The common data source
• Sharing data sources

Module 6: Model-Driven Apps

Module one to five discussed how to work with the original type of PowerApp known as a Canvas App, Microsoft have now introduced a second type of app known as a model-driven app. Model driven apps involve a different development process to canvas apps. We will review this development process during this module.
Model-Driven apps can be quicker to build than canvas apps, but they are less customizable and typically have a higher cost, knowing which type of app to use is not always a simple decision, we will show you the pros and cons of each.

Topics Covered

• What is a model-driven app?
• Where will my data be stored?
• How do create a model-driven app
• Canvas vs model-driven summary
• Mobile App

Module 7: PowerApps Integration

PowerApps is designed to easily connect to other business systems to read and update information. In this module we will discuss some simple ways to integrate PowerApps with key Office 365 systems including Teams, SharePoint Online and Flow. The result, is the ability to use a combination of systems to create solutions for a variety of business requirements.

Topics Covered

• Start a Flow from a PowerApp
• Embed PowerApps in Teams
• Embed PowerApps in SharePoint Online

Module 8: Administration and Maintenance

In our last module for Microsoft PowerApps, we will be looking at how a business can manage their existing apps. This could be using analytics to discover usage trends. We will discover how to export and import apps, so they can be reused in other locations. Finally, we will discuss how Office 365 administrators can shape the PowerApps experience with high-level settings that help ensure data segregation and security.

Topics Covered

• Maintaining an app
• View analytics
• Export and import apps
• Office 365 administration for PowerApps
• Environments
• Data policies
• Data integration

Module 1: An Introduction to Microsoft Flow

Let’s get started with an introduction to Microsoft Flow. Historically, automating business processes typically landed in the lap of a developer in the business, who has a good understanding of coding and the systems that they were connecting. However, more and more systems deployed to businesses are encouraging a bigger focus on end user design and management. With this culture change, end users are looking to further improve their business solutions. Flow brings workflow design to all audiences. It offers the building blocks for lightweight or business-critical processes. In this module, we cover an overview of the product and its application to Office 365 and third-party services.

Topics Covered

• What is Microsoft Flow?
• The benefits of automation
• How to get to Flow

Module 2: Getting started with Flow

We begin our discovery of Microsoft Flow by building our first business process. We will discuss how to use templates to get started with Flow or how to use a blank template to start with no defined actions. Once in the product, we will give you a tour of the editor, workflow management page and the home screen to help you navigate around the product. Next, we will start to add, edit and remove actions from our workflow template in order to customize the Flow for a specific business need. Once ready we will publish and trigger the workflow to test that it works as expected. We will finish this module by discussing how to turn a Flow on or off as well as deleting a Flow.

Topics Covered

• Using Flow templates
• Navigating in Flow
• Editing a Flow
• Publish and trigger a Flow
• Turn off or delete a Flow

Module 3: Flow logic

Decision making during a business process is often a bottleneck. Waiting for decisions or information to steer the workflow towards its goal is dependent on how long the involved party spends on the task. This could be mitigated if the desired information is found declared elsewhere for example, as a document property or a form entry to name a few examples. Logic in a workflow allows existing information to push the workflow down multiple paths. This often speeds up workflow duration and minimizes human input. In this module, we will look at the core logic found in Flow and a practical application of each option.

Topics Covered

• Adding conditions
• Designing switches
• Using apply to each
• Configuring do until logic
• Adding a scope

Module 4: Integration

Businesses will often user a selection of productivity tools and services beyond Office 365. Marketing teams may use Facebook and Twitter whereas a sales team may use Salesforce to manage their customers. Flow provides connectors for popular services allowing your processes to extend beyond Office 365 to other web services. Connections can even be made to on-premises servers, allowing your business systems house at the office to take part in your processes.

Topics Covered

• Standard and premium connectors
• Connecting to web services
• Using Flow with on-premises data

Module 5: The mobile app

Flow has a corresponding mobile app that can be used to leverage many features of Flow. Firstly, it offers users the capability to build new Flows, directly from their phone or tablet. Secondly, it can be used to manage existing flows including editing, viewing history, saving a copy, disabling and deleting Flows. You can access any approvals that have been sent to you by Flow and approve or reject decisions. The app also supports the push notifications that can be sent to your phone or tablet from a Flow. Additionally, you can even create buttons that appear in the app which allow you to trigger Flows. This valuable app will be detailed in this module.

Topics Covered

• Downloading the mobile app
• Signing in and account management
• Building and managing Flows
• Creating buttons
• Feeds and approvals

Module 6: Administration and maintenance

In our last module for Microsoft Flow, we will be taking a look at how a business can manage their Flows once they have a good uptake of the product. We will begin by discussing managing individual Flows. This could be using history to discover the source of any issues and implement error handling as well as using the analytics to discover usage trends. We will discover how to share a Flow which is ideal for sharing the maintenance of a Flow with another colleague and how to import and export Flows. Finally, we will discuss how Office 365 administrators can shape the Flow experience with high-level settings that help ensure data segregation and security.

Topics Covered

• Maintaining a Flow
• View history and analytics
• Sharing a Flow
• Export and import Flows
• Office 365 administration for Flow
• Environments
• Data policies
• Data integration

Microsoft Power BI

Getting Started with Power BI is 2-day online training course designed for students who are just getting started with Power BI and who need to get up to speed on building and deploying custom solutions using the Power BI Service and Power BI Desktop. Students will work through hands-on lab exercises to gain and reinforce skills for using a project-based approach for building custom BI solutions using Power BI Desktop.

 

This module introduces the fundamental concepts and terms associated with the Power BI platform. Students will learn how to create a trial tenant in Office 365 to serve as a multiuser development environment for designing and testing custom Power BI solutions. Students will learn to navigate around in the Power BI service using a browser and to create a simple solution which includes a dataset, a report and a dashboard. The module teaches students about Power BI licensing and the differences between standard Power BI subscriptions and a Power BI Pro subscriptions. The module concludes by discussing how to keep current with the Power BI cloud cadence and the monthly updates that Microsoft consistently applies to the Power BI platform.

Topics Covered

• Understanding the Power BI Platform
• Creating a Trial Office 365 Tenant for Development
• Creating Datasets, Reports and Dashboards
• Understanding Power BI Licensing
• Staying in Sync with Monthly Updates

This module introduces students to Power BI Desktop and provides a high-level overview of managing the lifecycle of a Power BI Desktop project. Students will learn how the contents of a Power BI Desktop project are saved and published using the PBIX project file format. The module demonstrates how to import data from an external source into a Power BI Desktop project to create a dataset. Students will also learn how to get started with data modeling by creating simple calculated columns and measures. Students will also get hands-on experience using the report designer in Power BI Desktop and publishing a PBIX project file to the Power BI service to make a Power BI Desktop report accessible through the browser.

Topics Covered

• Getting Started with Power BI Desktop
• Creating Queries in Power BI Desktop
• Modeling Data in Power BI Desktop
• Designing Reports in Power BI Desktop
• Publishing Power BI Desktop Projects

MODULE 3: MASTERING THE QUERY FEATURES OF POWER BI DESKTOP

This module provides an in-depth examination of designing and running queries in a Power BI Desktop project. Students will learn to import data from a variety of external datasources including text files, Excel workbooks, web pages, Azure SQL databases, SharePoint Online and Dynamics 365. The module demonstrates how to design queries to clean up and transform data during the import process and students will learn the why and the how of designing queries in a Power BI Desktop project to generate a star schema. Along the way, students will learn advanced query design techniques to merge columns from multiple datasources and to append rows from multiple sources tables into a single output table.

Topics Covered

• Deciding What To Measure
• Working with the Query Editor Window
• Managing Queries, Datasources and Credentials
• Designing Queries in a Project to Generate a Star Schema
• Creating a Query to Merge Columns from Multiple Datasources
• Creating a Single Table by Appending Rows from Multiple Datasources

This module examines the data modeling features in Power BI Desktop project and teaches students how to extend a data model with table relationships, calculated columns, measures and dimensional hierarchies. The module discusses working with the DAX expression language and reviews guidelines for writing maintainable DAX expressions. Students will learn how to import a lookup table from a secondary data source and how to integrate the lookup table into a data model to assist with data categorization. The module also demonstrates how to configure the metadata for geolocation fields within a data model so they can be used to visually map aggregated data values to geographical locations such as countries, states, cities and zipcodes.

Topics Covered

• Modeling Data in Power BI Desktop
• Understanding Table Relationships
• Writing DAX Expressions
• Understanding Calculated Columns versus Measures
• Creating Dimensional Hierarchies
• Adding Geographic Fields to a Data Model

 MODULE 5: DESIGNING INTERACTIVE REPORTS IN POWER BI DESKTOP

This module demonstrates how to use the report design features of Power BI Desktop to create reports using the standard set of Power BI visuals. Students will learn to design reports with effective interactive behavior by adding slicers, visual highlighting and drill actions. The module introduces students to the Power BI Custom Visuals Gallery and explains how to import custom visuals into a Power BI Desktop project. The module teaches students how to use Phone Layout view to create mobile reports as well as how to publish Power BI reports to the Power BI service. Students will learn how to use the Publish to SharePoint feature and the Publish to Web feature in Power BI to deploy reports to SharePoint Online sites and to public websites on the Internet with anonymous access.

 

Topics Covered

• Designing Interactive Reports
• Importing Custom Visuals
• Designing Mobile Reports using Phone Layout View
• Publishing a PBIX Project File to the Power BI Service
• Publishing Reports in SharePoint with the Power BI Web Part
• Publishing Reports using the Publish to Web Feature

The module examines the role that dashboards play in Power BI and teaches students about the strengths and weakness of dashboards in comparison to Power BI reports. Students will learn about best practices in dashboard design and how to create an effective drilldown scheme from a dashboard into its underlying reports. Students will also learn about Natural Language Q&A and how to pin Q&A query results to create a dashboard tile. The module teaches students how to use Phone Layout view customize the mobile layout of a dashboard and examines using dashboard sharing as a simple mechanism to make dashboards and reports accessible to other users. The module concludes by examining how to configure a dashboard with data alerts to send notifications when a measure behind a dashboard tile reaches a predefined threshold.

Topics Covered

• Understanding the Differences between Dashboards and Reports
• Creating and Configuring Dashboards
• Executing Queries with Natural Language Q&A
• Designing Dashboards for Mobile Devices
• Sharing Dashboards with Other Office 365 Users
• Configuring Data Alerts on Dashboard Tiles

This module discusses the three primary techniques that can be used to integrate Excel workbooks into the Power BI environment.  points that exist between the Excel Desktop application, Excel Online and the Power BI platform. First, students will learn how to connect to Excel workbooks from a Power BI workspace. Next, students will learn how to import an Excel workbook into Power BI to create a new Power BI dataset from the data inside the workbook. Finally, the module teaches students how to migrate a data model from inside an Excel workbook into a new Power BI Desktop project. Along the way, students will learn about several other features to assist with Excel to Power BI integration such as the Power BI Publisher Add-in for Excel and the Analyze in Excel feature.

Topics Covered

• Data Modeling in Excel versus Power BI Desktop
• Connecting to an Excel Workbook from Power BI
• Migrating an Excel Data Model into Power BI Desktop
• Using the Power BI Publishing for Excel Add-in
• Connecting from Excel to a Power BI Dataset

 

The module examines the best practice of building a custom solution in an app workspace and then using the app model to distribute the custom solution on a wide-scale basis. This module walks through the steps of publishing an app workspace and making it accessible to other users as an installable app. Students will learn the various ways one can install a Power BI app. The module demonstrates how to upgrade reports and dashboards after an app has been installed using staged updates. The module explains the essential concepts involved with Power BI Premium and dedicated capacities and demonstrates how to configure an app workspace to run within a dedicated capacity. Along the way, this module will provide students with the decoder ring necessary to understand the capacity-based licensing model and strategies for distributing content to users with the Power BI free license.

Topics Covered

• Understanding the Role of App Workspaces
• Publishing App Workspaces and Installing Apps
• Updating Apps and Managing App Lifecycle
• Understanding Power BI Premium and Dedicated Capacities
• Configuring App Workspaces to Run in a Dedicated Capacity
• Distributing Content to Users with the Power BI Free License