Building a simple card in Power Apps was a difficult task. If you wanted to show a list of records in a clean, visual way, you couldn’t just use one control. You had to manually assemble a patchwork of different elements. You would add a container for the background, drag in a label for the name, another label for the status, a text input if you wanted inline editing, and an image for the picture. Then came the hardest part spending valuable time fighting with the alignment, spacing, and padding to make sure every card in your gallery looked identical. If one label stretched, the layout often broke. It was time-consuming, frustrating, and resulted in inconsistent user interfaces.
This is a common challenge. In many business apps, users don’t always need to edit a record. They need to review it, compare it to others, and make a quick decision. Forcing them to open a full edit form for every single record is slow and frustrating.
To solve this, Microsoft introduced the Card Modern Control (Preview). It’s a new, purpose-built control designed for quick, scannable summary views. It moves beyond the old method of cobbling together multiple labels and images, offering a clean, consistent, and responsive card layout out-of-the-box. This isn’t just about saving development time; it’s about fundamentally improving how users consume information in your apps.
Card Modern Control provides:
- One single, reusable UI control
- Automatic spacing and layout
- Responsive design that works on all screen sizes
- A consistent look based on Microsoft’s Fluent design system
The Problem It Solves
Forms are built for data entry. They are not optimized for comprehension. In many business applications, users face the same core challenge: information overload and context switching.
- Too Much Time Opening Records: Users spend hours opening record after record just to find a single piece of information, like an approval status or a due date.
- Friction in Reviewing: The constant back-and-forth between a list screen and a detail screen breaks focus and slows down workflow.
- Difficulty in Comparison: It’s nearly impossible to compare multiple records when you can only see one at a time in a full-screen form.
- Unnecessary Complexity: Users are presented with dozens of editable fields when they simply need to read a handful of key data points.
These problems aren’t limited to sales or CRM. There are universal business needs like HR portals (reviewing leave requests), IT ticketing systems (checking priority and assignee), project dashboards (comparing task status), and approval apps of all kinds... Read More
