Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Not looking for technical solutions (yet) as much as logical ones. Instead of being multiple tools to view the same data, Microsoft seems to have multiple tools each working off their own copy of the data, and every time you bring that data to a different tool you're creating a new fork. And it's throwing us for a loop.

Example, I can create a Power App to collect RSVPs, but I could also use Forms. Or SharePoint. Or Teams. Or Outlook. It's all the same data - name, timestamp, yes/no/pending - but I have to use the interface it was collected in to interact with it. If I want to view it elsewhere, it needs to be exported and formatted to work with the other -- and then, in most cases, you can't make changes and bring the data back to update the original.

When you go to make a Power App, there is a very clear distinction between Excel vs SharePoint vs SQL, etc, as data sources, but no clear explanation why or what the difference is. If you're starting from scratch and have no digital data, what should be considered when deciding what interface to use to enter in the data?

If I'm planning a meeting and want to have RSVPs in Outlook so that I can easily get in touch with those planning to attend or that haven't yet responded, or to view schedules to adjust the time, I loose the option of having a form to collect data from a user at their time of RSVP, unless I start daisy chaining things together or I make the users respond via Outlook AND fill out the form, and hope that too many people don't do one and not the other. And that just seems silly!

We've been burnt a few times when we use a great solution only to find we need to make modifications to the data; usually simple stuff like eliminating a certain character from user responses to avoid triggering errors in someone else's software. And for a dataset that is continuously growing, that meant that every time we wanted to run the buggy software, we needed to export and inspect every single record, even the ones we've corrected time and time before, because there was no way for us to put the corrections back in the original table unless we did them manually one at a time in the browser.

Hope that made sense. We're an all-volunteer outfit, our "IT" are a couple of (not-CS) engineers and we have a hard time working with "things" that we can't physically kick or whack with a hammer. Somehow managed to build and keep the tenant running for nearly 10 years, but it'd be nice if we could figure out how to take advantage of the nifty toys...

Thanks for taking the time to read, any explanations or suggested reading material is greatly appreciated!

-J

Categories:

Building Power Apps