Time-Saving Tips: How to Boost Performance with Power Apps and Power Automate

In today’s GenZ world, time is very precious. There is a quote by Robin Sharma which states, “Time slips away like grains of sand never to return.” Therefore, spending hours on such repetitive manual activities hinders productivity and increases irritation among end users. In this scenario, the duplets Microsoft’s Power Apps and Power Automate come to the rescue.

Before delving deeply into Power Apps and Power Automate, let’s look at several scenarios when these duos can be useful.

• Process for Onboarding Customers: –
  • Streamline the onboarding process of Customers or Employees by using a Power App to collect the required data and activate Power Automate processes for account creation, alerting pertinent teams, and starting welcoming communications.

• Document Approval Process: –
  • Automate the approval of documents by developing a Power App for file submission and Power Automate flows for tracking the route of documents to specified approvers.

• Appraisal Review Process: –
  • Create a Power App so that employees may input their self-evaluations. Power Automate can then manage the review procedure by reminding managers, setting up meetings, and compiling comments.

In this blog post, we’ll have a look at how to use these tools to automate repetitive operations and free up time and energy for more worthwhile projects.

Choose target:

Identifying operations ready for automation is the first phase in any automation project. Search for regular rule-based and tedious tasks. This process could include ranging from entering information and reminders to approval mechanisms.

Power Apps' and Power Automate's individual benefits:

Power Apps:-
The Power Apps falls beneath the awning Microsoft Power Platform, which consists of apps, data services, and connectors that enable an individual or an entire organization to build a customized application without complex coding.
Power Apps allows a larger user base to create custom applications, encouraging innovation, increasing efficiency, and providing more specialized solutions for corporate needs.

Some of the advantages are:-
 Rapid and Customised Application Development
 Integrate with other Microsoft Services like SharePoint, Ms.365, Dynamics 365, and Azure.
 Empowers end users to take charge of application and not solely rely on IT or external app developers.

Power Automate:
Without intricate coding, it enables users to automate monotonous chores, streamline procedures, and link different systems. Power Automate allows Users to build automated workflows between various apps, services, and data sources.

Some of the advantages are:-
 It can quickly and accurately retrieve data from a single source, modify it, and afterward load it onto a different application, which saves time and typo errors.
 With the help of Power Automate’s tracking and auditing functions, users can keep tabs on how workflows are being executed, see any potential bottlenecks, and look up previous workflow runs.
 Individuals are capable of setting up automated alerts and notifications for a variety of occurrences.
o Ex: When a fresh assistance ticket is opened, Power Automate, for instance, may deliver a notification email or an alert on Microsoft Teams.

Now that we know the advantages of Power Apps and Automate, let’s look at some tips and best practices to complete these chores more quickly and easily.

Tips & Best Practices

1. Do not add more than 30 connections to a single app.
Apps require new users to log in to each connector, so the time it takes for an app to launch is increased by each additional connector. Each connector uses CPU, memory, and the network’s bandwidth when an app needs data from a source during app operation.

2. Limit the number of controls in an application to 500.
Power Apps creates an HTML DOM (Document Object Model) to render each control. Power Apps require greater production time as you add more controls. If you utilize a gallery rather than individual controls, you may be able to get the same goal and have the program launch faster.

3. Boost OnStart Property in Application:
Utilize the Concurrent function when loading data sources concurrently; this can reduce the time it takes for an app to load data by 50%.

4. Eliminate control overlap between display screens in Apps:
An app’s screens are only loaded into memory when needed to increase performance. This optimization may encounter obstacles.
Prevent formula interdependence between screens as a result. You can sometimes exchange data between screens using a global variable and collection.

5. Utilizing extensive datasets:
Utilize delegable data sources and algorithms to help the apps run smoothly and allow users to get the required information. Non-delegable queries should be avoided if possible to prevent exceeding the information’s row limit of 2,000. Use indexes on fields as provided by the data sources, like SQL Server or SharePoint, for data-record columns that end-users may search, filter out, or sort data on.

6. Enhance Flows using Parallel Branches.
Flows will operate by default in sequence and from top to bottom.
But you can create flows with parallel action branches when those acts are independent. As a result, your flows may run much faster.

7. Peek Code in Flows:
You have the choice to view the code that underlies the action.
Peek Code can be extremely useful when you want to know which value an input field is utilizing in the background because some inputs will have a pleasant name in the application’s user interface.

8. Customize the action timeout duration in Flow:
Flows can last for a maximum of 30 days before stopping and all further actions ceasing to be executed. If the Flow terminates owing to a 30-day timeout, no additional error handling steps that you provide will be executed.
You can configure an approval action to go out before the 30-day restriction to ensure your error handling continues to have time to work after it expires.

Conclusion

To wrap things up, learning how to use Power Apps and Automate effectively is a process that pays off through increased productivity and simplified procedures. By putting these tips into practice, you’ll be comfortably on the path to mastering these tools and getting the most out of them.

References

Tips and best practices to improve performance of canvas apps – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn

Considerations for optimized performance in Power Apps | Microsoft Power Apps

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