Say goodbye to unwieldly spreadsheets and embrace a modern solution
Have you been in the situation where your current system doesn’t quite follow your process as you would like? You go back to the vendor and find that the functionality you want is available, but only as part of a costly bolt-on option that contains much more than you need.
Or perhaps you started out tracking a process with Excel and emails. It was fine when you started, but maybe the process grew in complexity, so your Excel workbook grew accordingly, and the volume of emails increased, to the point where the process has become too unwieldy and time-consuming.
Or maybe you’re thinking of implementing a new process, or revamping an existing one, with a system to manage data entry, processing and storage, but the requirement is not so big that you need a commercial off-the-shelf solution.
For each of these situations you can build your own solution. A Canvas Power App can coordinate data exchange between your process users and a set of data tables that are stored as SharePoint lists. Together, the Power App and SharePoint lists perform like an operational database. This could sit as an offshoot from your current system or as a small standalone solution.
There are benefits of using SharePoint, including:
When it comes to developing Power Apps, there is so much good free advice out there from experts like Matthew Devaney, Shane Young, Lisa Crosbie, Darren Neese and many others. Combined with the wealth of guidance provided by Microsoft, you can learn from scratch and create your own solution in about 4 to 6 weeks.
Below I will summarise the main steps you should go through with an example project (one I adapted from Darren Neese’s work order tutorial, easily found on Youtube). This solution is for a garage that performs inspection, maintenance and repair work on cars.