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

by James Townsend

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/

Updated 9/7/2021

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.

See related posts on Power Apps:

Microsoft Power Apps and Power Platform: Build Apps without Limits

More on Microsoft Power Apps: Model-driven Apps, Canvas Apps and Portals

Energize your Intranet with Microsoft Power Apps and Customer Voice

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

Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow Licensing for Beginners

Key Concepts for Microsoft Dynamics 365: Tenant, Instance, App and Solution

To understand Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Dynamics CRM), you need to learn some new terms and concepts that may be a bit different from what you know from databases and solutions that are hosted on premises. This post introduces some of the key terms and how these concepts are important for planning your implementation. While Dynamics 365 is available on premises, it is most commonly deployed on the Microsoft cloud. This blog post discusses only cloud implementations. Microsoft has multiple clouds such as commercial and government community clouds. We start with a Microsoft tenant . A tenant is the account you create in the Microsoft Online Services environment (such as Office 365) when you sign up for a subscription. A tenant contains uniquely identified domains, users, security groups, and subscriptions. Your tenant has a domain name of .onmicrosoft.com such as acme.onmicrosoft.com. User accounts belong to a tenant, and subscriptions are assigned to user accoun

Understanding Dynamics 365 and Office 365 Admin Roles

Managing Dynamics 365 instances If you run Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Dynamics CRM) in the Microsoft cloud, you need to understand how your Dynamics instances relate to Office 365 and choose which of your administrators receives which roles and permissions to manage Dynamics 365. In on premises deployments, your network administrator would create and delete user accounts. The Dynamics 365 admin would then assign permissions to users in Dynamics 365. This post explains three administrator roles: Office 365 Global Administrator Dynamics 365 System Administrator Dynamics 365 Service Administrator You may think that the Dynamics 365 system administrator would have power to do all the actions needed to manage Dynamics 365, but this is not the case. What's different in Microsoft cloud deployments is that licenses and user accounts are managed in Office 365 by an Office 365 Global Administrator. This role is analogous to a network administrator for an on premises

Replacing Microsoft InfoPath with Power Apps

Source: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/infopath/ by James Townsend Microsoft has offered a number of forms automation products over the years, and the most long running was InfoPath which was released as part of Office 2003. InfoPath is a powerful and flexible product that stores user data in XML while offering form features such as rules, data validation, scripting, and integration with SharePoint. The popularity of SharePoint resulted in many organizations standardizing on InfoPath for forms, especially internal forms which are hosted on an intranet such as employee reviews, leave and payment requests, and human resources forms. Microsoft has discontinued InfoPath, with mainstream support ending July 13th, 2021, and extended support ending July 14th, 2026. Microsoft has named Power Apps as the successor to InfoPath . Power Apps has much in common with InfoPath. Both products include integration with SharePoint. Both are geared toward the citizen developer and do

The Townsend Report

Search This Blog