The Career Development Plan app gets its first screen. When someone opens the app, the Home screen greets them by name and shows their job title and manager. Everyone sees a My plan button, and managers also see My team. Behind it are the app's named formulas, which every later screen reuses.
Max returns the largest of its numbers. Give it a list of values, or a table and a column, and it hands back the biggest. Beyond the obvious uses, like the latest score or the highest amount, it's handy for layouts: "make this as tall as whichever of these is tallest".
Not flips a true-or-false value: true becomes false, false becomes true. You'll use it constantly with checks like IsEmpty and IsBlank, which answer the opposite of the question you usually want to ask. Power Fx lets you write it as a function, Not(...), or as the ! operator.
Data has gaps: a first name nobody filled in, an optional field left empty. Coalesce gives you a fallback: it returns the first of its values that isn't blank. One short function replaces a longer If with IsBlank, and reads better too.
"Welcome, Olivia" is fixed text joined to a value from a formula. Power Apps gives you two ways to write that: the & operator, and string interpolation with $"...". They produce the same text; the difference is how readable your formula is. Here are both, tried side by side in Studio.
Sometimes you want a table as a sentence: "Aisha Khan, Leo Martin" rather than a gallery with two rows. Concat goes through every row of a table, works out some text for each, and joins the results with a separator you choose. It's also the quickest way to see what's in a table while you build.
Sort puts the rows of a table in order: people by name, requests by date, items by priority. Data from connectors comes back in whatever order the service chooses, so sorting it yourself makes lists predictable. Here's the syntax, the descending option, and a real example.
Filter takes a table and keeps only the rows that match a condition: the competencies for one job title, the active people in a team, the requests still waiting. It works on SharePoint lists, connector results and any other table, and it's the formula behind almost every gallery. Here's how it works, with two real examples.
If is how a canvas app makes decisions: show this text or that, use this color or that, run this action or not. It takes a condition, a result for when it's true, and (optionally) a result for when it's false. Here's the syntax and two real examples that change a message depending on what Microsoft 365 knows about the user.
"Is there anything there?" sounds like one question, but Power Apps answers it with two functions. IsBlank checks a single value or record. IsEmpty checks whether a table has any rows. Use the wrong one and the answer is always false. Here's the difference, with real results, plus Blank(), which creates the "nothing" they test for.
