How to build your first Power App in a weekend

I hear this a lot: "I've been meaning to try Power Apps but I don't know where to start." Or sometimes: "I looked at it once and got overwhelmed."

Both are fair. Microsoft's tools have a learning curve, and the sheer number of options when you first open Power Apps can feel paralyzing. But here's the thing. You can build something genuinely useful in a single weekend. Not a toy. Not a demo. A real app that your team will actually use on Monday morning.

I've helped dozens of people get their first Power App up and running, from admins who've never written a line of code to engineers who can code but don't have time to build a full application. The process is more approachable than most people expect.

What Power Apps actually is

If you haven't looked at it yet, Power Apps is a low-code platform from Microsoft that lets you build business applications without traditional programming. You drag and drop elements onto a screen, connect them to data sources, and add logic using formulas that work a lot like Excel.

That last part is what makes it click for most people. If you can write an IF statement or a VLOOKUP in Excel, you already have the skills to build basic Power Apps logic. The formula language (called Power Fx) is intentionally designed to feel like Excel.

Power Apps comes in two flavors. Canvas apps give you full control over the layout, like designing a slide in PowerPoint, but it's interactive. Model-driven apps are more structured and built on top of Dataverse tables, which I wrote about in what Dataverse is and why it matters. For your first app, go with a canvas app. It's more intuitive.

Pick a real problem (a small one)

The biggest mistake people make with their first app is picking something too ambitious. They want to rebuild their entire ERP system or create a company-wide project management tool. That's a recipe for frustration and an unfinished app.

Pick something small and specific. Something that annoys you or your team right now and involves some kind of data entry or data lookup. Here are examples that work well as first apps:

A simple equipment checkout log. Who took what, when, and when did they return it.

A meeting room booking form. Pick a room, pick a time, submit.

An IT help desk request form that replaces the current process of "email Bob and hope he sees it."

A daily safety checklist that field crews fill out on their phones instead of on paper.

An inventory count tool where someone scans or types an item number and updates the count.

All of these can be built in a weekend by someone who's never touched Power Apps before. They all solve a real problem. And they all give you a foundation you can build on later.

Saturday morning: get set up and explore

Here's roughly how I'd structure your weekend if you're starting from zero.

Start by going to make.powerapps.com and signing in with your work Microsoft account. If your company has Microsoft 365, you probably have access to Power Apps already. If you're not sure, ask your IT department, or just try signing in and see what happens.

Create a new canvas app and choose the phone layout. Phone layouts are simpler because you have less screen space to fill, and the app will work on both phones and computers.

Spend an hour just playing around. Drag a button onto the screen. Add a text input. Add a gallery (that's the list component). Connect to a SharePoint list or an Excel file in OneDrive and see your data show up. Don't try to build your actual app yet. Just get comfortable with how the editor works.

The editor looks complicated at first, but you only need to understand a few things to get started: screens, controls (buttons, text inputs, labels, galleries), properties (what each control does), and formulas (the logic that ties it all together).

By lunch, you should feel comfortable enough to start building.

Saturday afternoon: build your first screen

Now pick your project from the list above (or your own small problem) and start building.

Let's say you're building an equipment checkout log. You need:

A form screen where someone enters their name, the equipment they're taking, and the date.

A list screen that shows all current checkouts.

A data source to store everything. For your first app, a SharePoint list works fine. Create a list with columns for Person, Equipment, Checkout Date, Return Date, and Status.

Start with the form. Add text input fields for each piece of information. Add a submit button. When someone taps submit, the button's OnSelect formula writes the data to your SharePoint list. The formula looks something like this:

Patch(EquipmentCheckouts, Defaults(EquipmentCheckouts), {
    Person: TextInput1.Text,
    Equipment: TextInput2.Text,
    CheckoutDate: Today(),
    Status: "Checked Out"
})

If you've used Excel formulas, this should look vaguely familiar. Patch is the function that writes data. The rest is just telling it what to write and where.

Then build the list screen. Add a gallery connected to your SharePoint list. Each item in the gallery shows the person's name, the equipment, and the date. Add a filter so it only shows items where Status equals "Checked Out."

That's your app. Two screens, one data source, a handful of formulas. It works. People can use it.

Sunday: make it actually good

Saturday's app works but probably looks rough. Sunday is about polish and practical improvements.

Navigation. Add buttons or icons to move between screens. The Navigate function handles this.

Validation. Make sure people can't submit an empty form. Add a check that disables the submit button if any required field is blank.

User experience. Add a confirmation message after someone submits. Clear the form fields so they can enter another record. Show a loading spinner if the data takes a moment to save.

Search and filter. Add a search box to the list screen so people can find specific records quickly.

Return flow. Add a way to mark equipment as returned. When someone taps an item in the list, show its details and add a "Mark as Returned" button that updates the Status field and fills in the Return Date.

By Sunday evening, you have a functional app that solves a real problem. It's not going to win any design awards, but it works and people can use it right away.

Common mistakes to avoid

I've watched a lot of people build their first Power App. These are the mistakes that trip up almost everyone.

Too many screens too early. Start with two or three screens. You can always add more later. People who start with ten screens get lost and frustrated.

Ignoring delegation. This is a technical thing that confuses beginners. When your app queries data from SharePoint, some operations can't be performed on large datasets. Power Apps shows you a little yellow warning triangle when this happens. For your first app with a small dataset, you can mostly ignore it. But it's good to know it exists so you're not confused by those warnings.

Not testing on a phone. If you built a phone layout app, test it on your phone. What looks fine in the editor sometimes looks cramped or broken on an actual device. You can publish the app and open it in the Power Apps mobile app to test.

Overcomplicating the data source. For your first app, one SharePoint list is enough. Don't try to set up Dataverse or SQL Server on your first attempt. Get something working, then upgrade the data source later if you need to.

Trying to make it perfect before sharing. Ship it when it works, not when it's perfect. Your team's feedback will tell you what actually needs improving, and it's usually not what you would have guessed.

What happens after the weekend

If your first app is useful (and it will be, if you picked a real problem), people will start asking for more. "Can it also do X?" "What if we added Y?" That's a good sign. It means people are using it.

This is where you have a choice. You can keep building yourself, which is great for learning. Or you can bring in help for the more complex stuff, which makes sense when the app needs proper security, integration with other systems, or when it's going to be used by hundreds of people.

I've written about when it makes sense to build versus buy if you're thinking about whether to keep going solo or get some help with the bigger vision.

A lot of the businesses I work with in Fort McMurray started exactly this way. Someone on the team built a small app, it solved a real problem, and then they brought me in to build out the rest or connect it to Power Automate flows for automation.

You don't need to be a developer

I want to be clear about this. You do not need a coding background to build useful Power Apps. Some of the best apps I've seen were built by operations coordinators, safety advisors, and admin staff who just got tired of a clunky manual process and decided to fix it.

The low-code and no-code movement exists specifically for people like that. People who understand their business problem better than any developer ever could, and just need a tool that doesn't require a computer science degree to use.

Power Apps isn't perfect. The editor can be buggy. The formula language has quirks. Sometimes you'll spend 30 minutes trying to figure out why a gallery isn't showing data, only to realize you misspelled a column name. That's normal. That happens to me too, and I do this for a living.

But the payoff is real. In a weekend, you can go from "I have this annoying process" to "I have an app for that." And once you've done it once, the second app is easier. And the third is easier still.

Ready to try it?

If you've been thinking about building a Power App, stop thinking and start building. Pick a small problem, block off a Saturday, and see what happens. The worst case is you learn something new. The best case is you build something your team uses every day.

And if you get stuck, or if you build your first app and realize you want something bigger, reach out to me. I've helped plenty of people go from "I built a thing" to "we run our operations on this." Happy to help you get there too.