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Meet Power Fx: The Language of Microsoft Power Apps Canvas Apps

Last week Microsoft made many announcements on Power Apps.  One of the most important was naming Power Fx, the unified language used in Power Apps Canvas Apps and other Power Platform products. This announcement is more than just naming a language because it unveils a long-term plan for standardizing the Power Platform stack of development tools. 

April Dunnam of Microsoft provides a concise explanation in the video above, relating the announcement to the groups of products and developers who are affected by the change. 

Formulas in Power Apps are based on Power Fx which uses expressions derived from Microsoft Excel. Power Fx is easier to learn than JavaScript.  It gives immediate results (or error messages) to the developer in a similar way to Excel.  The following shows functions highlighted in green which are shared by Power Fx and Excel.

Source: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/what-is-microsoft-power-fx/

Microsoft is targeting citizen developers or power users as a key segment of people who, in addition to other software developers, will create Power Apps solutions.  These users, perhaps more than other software developers, are likely to be familiar with Excel functions. 

Some Power Fx expressions are more concise than equivalent functions in JavaScript. 

By the end of 2021, Microsoft will be rolling out standardization on Power Fx for Dataverse calculated columns, AI Build, and Power Virtual Agents.  Subsequently the language will be standardized for Dataverse business rules and Power Automate.

For a more detailed explanation of Power Fx, see the video from Rory Neary:


Rory Neary offers a course on PowerFx on the Power Platform Learn academy and wrote a blog post to go along with the video intro. 

For more on Power Apps, see related posts from this blog:


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