all right over the last decade business intelligence and reporting has changed quite a bit a bi solution is no longer for large enterprises only providers of business intelligence today claim that it's easy to get started with the solution it's easy to work with the data it's easy to adopt and get everybody in the organization to make their own apps but is it really is it that easy to get started is the power platform easy to work with and power apps do we really need them so welcome to 30 minutes i'm oliver and today i'll be talking to jacob kornum a bi consultant from proactive denmark welcome jaguar thank you so first of all power apps in a nutshell why is it fantastic well it's fantastic because it empowers people it um it opens the door that's been shot forever okay interesting very good but well um go one step back and well basically just explain to me what is powerapps well powerapps is a is a low code business user application development tool it allows every everyday people um regular business people to actually develop an app which is fantastic so um that's the nutshell that's in a nutshell okay well could you explain it just a little bit in detail yeah i have slides you do yes i have slides all right let's see well let's dive into the slides then so we have um we have powaps which uh is a ridiculous name but a great product it's um it's a it's been developed over over the last five years but was inspired by some of the old products that we had we had infopath and we had access like um app development tools that were a bit too complex for for regular regular users um powerapps is a part of the fantastic power platform um it's um it's uh um it's the the trigger it's the input it's it's where you do things um so the power platform is where you do things all the power the power app is where you do things okay so well with regards to uh to the power platform power bi how do you compare those well well they're different things um power bi is the uh the windows and the dashboard of your car okay the car being a metaphor for your business and um and the and the power app is your steering wheel where you actually act on your your whole business as it looks through your window and um on top of that we have the automation with this which is uh since i'm doing this method for maybe uh some sort of engine behind the whole scene and so but then again take it into account that it's uh three different softwares three different tools how are they relevant together well they they they enhance each other it like the car you need all these aspects you need the steering you need the sight you need the engine to actually be moving forward you need all these things and but why do we need them well of course maybe maybe we don't need them maybe but people did business 200 years ago and and some of them probably did a very fine job but we have these super powered tools at our disposal now so why not be using them maybe we can do things better than we ever did before so this is what i think so you're saying that we already got the tools who are we and where do we already got them well we are the businesses we are uh all the companies out there that do things with with the data and the business and it's uh it's it's supposed to be one single uh uh brain behind it one organism um interesting interesting and and we of course do this on the magnificent power platform that really has a knocked all competition aside over the last few years okay you need to explain well well it's almost um like common knowledge these days that that we just we just get a lot of value on the buck with these products and uh and since uh um most of the people i talk to already have uh purchased uh licenses for the office platform they already got it they already bought these things okay well so what are you saying is it's basically for free it's already within well it's not free it's cheap though but it's not free i guess uh not a lot of things are free of course yeah okay but it might be included in something you already bought interesting interesting we'll go on and um and explain yeah i have more slides oh well powerapps is a cross-platform it works on a lot of um on a lot of different devices all the devices that i have in my house like tablets smartphones pcs and all other things that you can actually think of it i can even uh chromecast uh my power bi report or my power app to my television um i don't know why i would do that but i do but so so so what you're saying is that it's it's for everybody in the organization in the sense of that they are able to work with to get data out to get data back in to a fake data all these things from a smartphone yes actually you can you can act on your data on your way to a plane on in well the airport has been closed but in the grocery store over where you are okay or you can um you can you can implement the app in you can embed it inside your home page of your company or you can you can do all these uh fantastic things that people dream of all right well actually right now i think it sounds good somehow it's actually it sounds a bit like it's too good to be true so um well but as i see it well let's go a little bit deeper let's cut through the noise okay i want to see something you want to see something yeah enough slides i have most lights yeah in enough slides what you're saying is that it's a tool that it's easy to use it is it's for everybody you don't need necessarily to be a data scientist a bi consultant to work with the tools you're able to work with the tools as a not only um who can work with the tool could i work with the tool well it the um the few lines of code that you do write yeah are inspired by the excel function that that most of us are quite familiar with all right like an if function or something like that all right so you're basically saying if you are used to working with excel and to create basic formulas you should be able to get started yeah that was the idea all right still i think we need to cut through the noise i think i would like to see something okay well well what would you like to see well let's suppose that it's that easy let's suppose that it's that easy to get started to build an app build me an app yeah all right uh um i know it's kind of a challenge but they built me an app i can build you an app that's just boring when you press a button okay i can build you an app that phones my mother or maybe send an email to my boss let's keep it let's let's keep it business relevant let's keep it business relevant all right all right yeah so what i think we should work on today in these times uncertainty is is a major thing yes what people are concerned about what businesses are concerned about is what will be in the book what will be in the pipeline which orders are they maybe ready to to get in the future what it is so so forecasting and knowing your business is key right now the way that you do this is basically that in in a sense that you create some sort of a a pipeline in the crm system or whatnot yeah you might show that in a power bi report or whatnot yes we do that a lot all right could you build me an app that could work intelligent with this so that you could know even better what is in the pipeline based on a lot of things based on let's say knowledge from the salesman yes yes i know it's a kind of a challenge it is a challenge um but could you work with some sort of a forecasting app so that i as a business owner know what is in the pipeline and a pipeline that i can trust in 20 minutes well i can try i can try i think you should try all right well um at least we're putting it through the test all right and i make a fool of myself and and we were entertained so so we'll do it then let's see um all right um so take your time don't i won't interrupt you get the slides off the screen and but i think enough of talking enough of powerpoint now we know that we want to see something well i do have this power bi report um can we see my screen and i need to exit this minimize this and and we see my screen on the screen we have a a pretty standard uh report it's uh it's a sales values it's a demo data set and um we have total sales and products and dates and and a last year calculation um and let's just check if it's if we're live with the data i am connected to the internet so it should yes it's filtering and things are happening and i can so these of course some dummy data that you're able to uh to use yes of course it's it's the um it's the uh contoso data set that microsoft uh uh provided okay um so pretty basic report but um but with this report we have the budget and um and i had a customer that said we don't want to to uh to buy another uh a microsoft product that cost us a thousands of dollars a month uh because our need is to actually just enter a business value and save that and get on with it and and of course have that in our reporting because we don't want to open 5000 applications all the time so um so i will try to build an application that works within power bi that um that reacts on your your cross filters and your slices so you can actually drill down to the data you're interested in enhancing and you can enter your your values based on that perfect so are you ready i'm ready here we go um so i have this power bi report and my screen is weird and so first we start off on this um page and i i'm sorry that the interface is in danish i hope you will all understand it anyways it's a tenant setting no problem so i duplicate my report page so that if i mess everything up we still have the original page and i make a bit of room for the wonderful power app and if the maps there we go and maybe it auto sizes no it doesn't and here we go we have the power app visualization to feel it feel the warmth of your of the power visualization i do i do so before we we build our app we need to insert data into the app and we have uh we have a date calendar we need uh maybe to uh select a month and we get the label so it looks pretty and our year and then we have products so we use our product key and our product name and then uh we make sure that that the the numeric values of a month and year doesn't summarize because that doesn't make sense we don't need the sum of years so now we're we're actually getting ready to um create a new app from scratch perfect so far it seems quite easy so well i hope so if it doesn't break and if i don't make a fool of myself we'll see we'll see so this is what happens when you uh build your your app from from uh from a power bi uh point of view you get an auto generated page with a gallery in it so um just to get started of course let's go with the theme um we're from proactive so we'll go with the dark red theme there's a lot of dark red in in proactive and um let's uh let's go with an icon at the top this never made sense to me but the square it's it's the uh single it's the icon that i use the most for background and all sorts of things and i will send it to the back like in powerpoint we can have text on top we can say my budget would you recall it my budget and then we talk to the user and find a better name for it later and we make it a little bigger so it looks pretty there we go there's a title and then we need a we need a drop down to uh be able to uh select our year month and of course we need a button to send the whole g banks to our database did i mention that there's a sql database behind the report that we saw uh i probably didn't probably didn't know but it's a standard uh standard sequel setting in asia of course and um that's what we saw and to um to make this thing work this app will have to write to that um to that database so um i will try to connect to my database and there's a sql server and i always forget but i cheated and brought my own code or string and the database is called kanto so there we go all right this looks very good just continue yoga but everything is good just keep in mind that this is of course live meaning that we are creating something in the studio right now and if you do have some questions don't hesitate and i will try to not disturb jakob but see if i can answer the questions or get the questions to yagop as soon as you write them in the questions field yeah um should i continue talking okay um i will certainly cut a few corners um with this thing today when we build these kinds of apps it's always a very and i i need to stress this it's a very good idea um to um to give objects and a good name naming policy and i don't do that today [Laughter] so i guess i'm not drinking from my own kool-aid um which is uh well jeff luck uh so we need to um we need to filter the uh report let's go back i was just writing without and i forgot where i was no problem it is a little bit stressful i know building something um live and so on but uh just continue and uh yeah yeah we're we're doing it yeah oliver we're doing it um so before i forget what i was doing i will get serious and continue let's just go with the data connection at first and then we'll filter it later on so we need to edit our gallery so in our gallery we don't want to see the month of things um we actually want to see the product names so we got the product names from power bi and we can make it a little bigger and delete oh i deleted too much oh luckily luckily you can regret your your steps and you can't always do it so it could have been could have been a little bad uh then we put a text input here and this text input will be our budget or estimate or even maybe ordering fruit or whatever you're doing with this thing today we we thought about budgets but but it really could have been everything and um so here we have that we have we have sell we have a project product and we have the uh the slot for foreign amount and um and we have a drop down and we can preview the report and the report is has a drop down of items that is year months if i had more time i would make it prettier and with letters and years and something people could understand but we're busy today and ah this button should be called submit my numbers i always always call things give silly names but uh but of course it's easy to correct submit sub mid there we go so um so what we needed here was actually to filter the whole gallery from the year month selection so we do that and if i expand this field we'll see uh something like filter filter power bi data and we filter this by uh saying calendar month oh we had it here calendar month should be equal to whatever was selected in the drop down one you can see the objects on the side here and we can see that i had a drop-down menu called drop-down one so we select that and we say what's selected in don't be touching the selected text and then the result seems like a lot of steps to go through and we can run the app and we can slice this doesn't really show because there are products for all months oh okay but maybe if i had entered a budget value here and i selected a new month we we would see that um okay so uh how much time do i have a few minutes left yeah uh okay uh can i cheat a little bit it's a it's perfectly up to you um i will cheat with the um the input on the um submission and then i will go into the details of what we're doing here okay so this is the single most single longest piece of code that you'll see in in this kind of um of app and what it does is it runs through all the gallery items and it it checks if there is an input in the um in the uh text field and if there is an input it collects that input and and the the product name and what else was in that gallery item um and then uh it collects a list of all these inputs and then it checks does this input already exist in my database and if it does we need to change the uh the database and if it doesn't we need to write a new line and that's basically what it does it evaluates does the line exist and then we add it doesn't it if it doesn't exist then we create a new line all right and and so basically in 15 16 minutes you have almost created an app yeah well so um i baked a little bit from home but um but yes and then uh finally impressive but if it works now let's publish this thing and see if it works um because there is a chance that i made a mistake and i forgot something and uh we'll see right and we'll call this what do we call it sales budget sales budget in two words sales budget and this time we give it blue because i love blue and there's a star and we save this thing there we go it's saved and but if it was for real or or something uh i would of course share this with you but we don't need to share this now we just need to see the ooh okay look at this report oh what have we here all right impressive yes yeah yes i think so um so uh if we have a cigarette lighter adapter and i might be the salesperson responsible for uh for uh selling them and and i need to enter my budget what do i expect to sell in the uh first month of 2009 uh i expect to sell for uh 5 million there we go i'm very ambitious with this product perfect oh 5 million was too too large i forgot that maybe i put a a limit on the size of a values in in my sql table okay it's probably what you'd call a small int but uh or maybe uh i don't know but we'll see if if we have time i will go fix it or else i will just just believe me right so this is uh this data set is a direct connection and uh hopefully we'll see the budget value appear on the screen shortly so while we wait for that i'll show a bit more of the functionality that we had we can make we can drill down to the uh contoso the phone company brand of cell phones and wait for the report and i can um i can just type here oh that's my old phone phone number um [Music] and i expect to be selling 5000 of these and four months later i will be i don't know 4 000 of these and we submit that and it's thinking for a little while oh that was why why why is he doing that of course this is a kind of a challenge so um don't mind i think that we have seen that you're able to in a very short period of time create an app that is actually inside power bi that makes it possible for sales rep or any other yeah to validate and to fill in and to create better forecasts for organizations today certainly certainly and and um and this was just an example and following these types of solution there's always uh uh the possibility of creating reports like uh who didn't uh submit my uh their reports and uh okay when did they do it and who registered how many hours with a customer or and those are the worst kind yeah of course of course i understand very good but first of all thanks for accepting the challenge very brave of you and congratulations on building an app live impressive and i think basically we got it covered today that it's kind of easy to use yeah and and it somehow works of course you need to check it no problem but getting started is easy um so thank you very much jacob for for showing us what is possible today or to showing us part of what is possible so it was very nice yeah well it was a pleasure and uh and it was a rough challenge and i think i think we're right on schedule yeah which is quite impressive wasn't it i think so so um thank you very much aaron well thank you and uh what a nasty challenge you had thank you