Low-Code and No-Code Development Platforms
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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.
When a formula fails in a canvas app, say a connector call that finds nothing, Power Apps shows a red error banner and the control shows nothing. IfError catches the error and gives you a value to use instead, so the app carries on calmly. Here's how it works, with a real error from the Office 365 Users connector.
Len returns how many characters a piece of text has, spaces included. It's the tool for checking a maximum length before you save something, showing "123 of 4,000 characters", and finding spaces you can't see. One formula, one number.
Text typed by people often has spaces you can't see: one at the end of a job title, two between words. They look harmless, but "Sales Engineer " isn't equal to "Sales Engineer", so lookups quietly fail. Power Fx has two functions to clean them up, Trim and TrimEnds, and they don't do quite the same thing.
