Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Here's a step-by-step guide on how to create a Power App from an Excel template:

1. **Create an Excel Spreadsheet**: Start by creating an Excel spreadsheet and format the Excel as a Table⁷.
2. **Upload Your Excel File**: Upload your Excel file to a cloud location like OneDrive for Business⁷.
3. **Sign in to Power Apps**: Go to the Power Apps website and sign in⁷.
4. **Create Power Apps Canvas App from Excel File**: From the home screen, select 'Start with data' > 'Upload an Excel file'. Select 'Select from device' and navigate to the location where your Excel file is saved and upload it⁴.
5. **Save, Publish, and Preview the Power Apps App**: Once the table is created, select a column name or the table name to edit the properties to suit your needs. When you're done, select 'Create app'. The system will upload the first 20 rows of sample data so you can start reviewing the data in your app⁴.

Now, let's discuss the pros and cons of creating Power Apps from an Excel template:

**Pros**:
- **Ease of Use**: Users with very basic IT skills can cope with Excel⁸.
- **Work Outside of Power Apps**: You can easily work with the data outside of Power Apps⁸.
- **Backup**: It's simple to backup data by copying the spreadsheet⁸.
- **Cost-Effective**: Most of the Microsoft 365 plans include access to SharePoint, which makes it a very cost-effective choice⁸.

**Cons**:
- **Limited Data Access**: A severe limitation of Excel is that we can only access the first 2,000 rows of a spreadsheet⁸.
- **Data Size Limitation**: It's also impossible to store more than 2MB of data due to a limitation that the OneDrive connector imposes⁸.
- **Filtering and Searching Data**: The biggest limitation of SharePoint is that filtering and searching data can be difficult or impossible due to limited support for delegated queries⁸.

Please note that Excel is suitable only for simple apps where we don't need to store very much data⁸. For more complex apps, you might want to consider other data sources like SharePoint, Dataverse, or SQL Server⁸.

Source: Conversation with Copilot, 7/8/2024
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