SharePoint List Forms with PowerApps Now Available in First Release – and more!

Another day, another promise from the Ignite conference fulfilled. It’s great to see so many fantastic new capabilities rolling out to Office 365 – and quickly. At Ignite, the Product Group really seemed to focus on near term enhancements and improvements, which makes this last part of the year a fertile one for new goodies. I don’t usually do “here’s a new feature” posts, but some of the new features are just too good to acknowledge – plus, we’ve been waiting for the cloud fulfillment to come on some of this stuff for a long time.

This one is a little bittersweet for me, though, as having PowerApps for building list forms truly makes my value-added functions in SPServices obsolete. On the one hand, that makes me sad, but on the other hand, it should have happened long ago. Things like cascading dropdowns are just too important not to be a part of the product somehow.

This capability actually started rolling out last week, but I only noticed it over the weekend. The PowerApps team did a blog post last Wednesday, November 15,  entitled Announcing availability of custom forms, multi-value choice and read-only attachments support for SharePoint with PowerApps.

There are a number of announcements in the post, but here’s an executive summary:

• Custom SharePoint list forms with PowerApps – More about this below.
• Multi-select support for Choice, Lookup & People columns – My guess is these column types were what were holding up the PowerApps list forms capability, as these are unique to SharePoint. Since PowerApps has been built to be useful across many different parts of the Microsoft ecosystem, getting these column types into it was probably not high enough on the list for us SharePointilists.
• Read-only attachments support – Well, it’s a start. At least we can display attachments in our PowerApps forms, even though we can’t upload them. Hopefully that will come soon, and the PowerApps team acknowledges its importance.

The big story here is using PowerApps for SharePoint list forms. They have been teasing us with this one for a while now, and the screenshots (like the one above – maps always get people excited!) made many of us excited for this day.

The out of the box forms for lists (and libraries) have never been all that sexy. Their utilitarian nature belied the almost magical capability we were getting in that the forms adapted immediately to any changes to the list structure and settings. We’ve had that capability for so long now that many people have lost site of how cool that actually is.

Most people want their forms to be pretty, or more importantly to better represent the look or flow of a business process. Forms are in a sense where the rubber meats the road for content management. We want them to work well for collecting metadata so that we can have as friction-less an experience as possible. If adding metadata doesn’t feel artificial or burdensome, we gain so many important benefits down the road. Metadata is NOT dead!

I believe that forms and process ought to be decoupled, and that’s what the PowerApps and Flow split does for us. Many forms are just forms and that’s it. Other times, we may need to layer in some process, and that’s where Flow comes in.

It's not pretty (my fault), but I'm psyched to see a @PowerApps form on my @SharePoint list! https://t.co/URtP0w421m pic.twitter.com/ErUDB3u4zn

— Marc D Anderson (@sympmarc) November 19, 2017

 

Creating the example I tweeted above showing PowerApps on one of my test lists was about a 3 minute process. Here’s how it works.

First, you must be in First Release for Tenant. First Release for Select Users will NOT get you this capability. Most organizations will not have First Release for Tenant enabled in “production”, so you may need to spin up a side tenant to play around with this.

The distinction between these two types of First Release is a constant source of confusion, and I’ll keep pushing for more clarity – even in the face of the change from First Release the the Targeted Release terminology. Leave it to Microsoft to rename things!

When you go into a list, you’ll see PowerApps on the toolbar, as you have for a while now. What’s new is the Customize forms option.

When you click Customize forms, you’ll be launched through a series of animated and flashing screens to land you in PowerApps with a default form already set up for you. It’s likely to feel a little disconcerting, frankly, especially if you haven’t used PowerApps before.

But the upshot is that you now have a fancy new PowerApps-based form – all ready to use, even if you don’t make any modifications. Note the Back to SharePoint link in the upper left. Once you’re done making any changes, you can click that link and you’ll see this dialog:

You’ll want to click Save and Publish. This will lead you through some more flashing screens – be patient – and you’ll land back on your list with your new form magically in place. If you select an item in the list and click Edit, you’ll see it.

I’m not going to go into how PowerApps works here, but there are some excellent tutorials out there from folks like Laura Rogers (@wonderlaura).

If you decide you’d like to switch back to the default list forms – or even back to Infopath – you’ll find that setting under List Settings / Form Settings. You can also delete the PowerApps form you’ve created here in case you want to start over (which I did to get some of these screenshots).

I expect this new capability is going to usher in a sort of forms renaissance in SharePoint. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, PowerApps is indeed the successor to Infopath, though don’t expect a one to one feature comparison just yet. Happy form-ulating!