Modern businesses run on data.

Daily, users are performing tasks such as

entering their time for payroll, working through existing processes, or using data
to make business related decisions. In our technology driven world, users can be
empowered to gain insights from and interact with data all while automating
menial or repetitive job tasks. Microsoft Power Platform enables your business to
craft solutions while empowering you to unite customized technology to help
everyone and to drive the business with data-driven insights.
This module provides an overview of Microsoft Power Platform, which allows
users to create custom applications, data visualizations, and automated
workflows using a point-and-click approach. After completing this module, you'll
be able to explain the Power Platform and describe its business value. You're
introduced to Power Fx, which is the low-code programming language that
underlies Power Platform capabilities. You should understand the types of
connectors available and explain the importance of Microsoft Dataverse for
business solutions. You also learn how Power Platform works with Microsoft 365
apps and services, Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365, and Azure Services. Finally,
you learn how Copilot in Microsoft Power Platform can streamline tasks simply by
describing what you need the application to do through multiple conversational
steps. The module provides further resources for further study, including links to
Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, connectors, Dataverse, and Microsoft
Copilot Studio materials.
The goal of this module is to provide learners with an understanding of Microsoft
Power Platform and its capabilities. Learn how it's used to create custom
applications, automate workflows, and analyze data. By the end of this module,
learners are able to explain the business value of Power Platform and its
integration with other Microsoft services.
Explore Microsoft Power Platform
Completed100 XP
 7 minutes
The Power Platform provides organizations with the opportunity to empower their
team members to build their own solutions through an intuitive low-code or no-
code set of services. These services help simplify the process of building
solutions. With Power Platform, solutions can be built in days or weeks, as
opposed to months or years. Microsoft Power Platform is composed of four key
products: Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Pages.

Microsoft Power Apps

Power Apps provides a rapid low code development environment for building
custom apps for business needs. It's a suite of apps development services with a
scalable data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) and an ability to interact with cloud
& on-premises data sources. Power Apps enables the creation of web and mobile
applications that run on all devices.
People use mobile apps for every area of their lives, and business should be no
exception. Most out-of-the-box solutions don't meet exact business needs or
integrate well with other business programs. Power Apps eases users into app
development with a simple interface, so that every business user or pro
developer can build custom apps.
Microsoft Power Automate
Power Automate lets users create automated workflows between applications
and services. It helps automate repetitive business processes such as
communication, data collections, and decision approvals. Don't waste important
productive hours on drafting the same email for a weekly update or manually
walking through approval processes, Power Automate can provide automation
not only for the individual user, but also for enterprise-grade process automation.
Its simple interface allows users with every technical competence (from
beginners to seasoned developers) to automate work tasks.
Microsoft Power BI
Power BI is a business analytics service that delivers insights for analyzing data.
It can share those insights through data visualizations, which make up reports
and dashboards to enable fast, informed decisions. Power BI scales across an
organization and has built-in governance and security, to allow businesses to
focus on using data more than managing it.
You can consider Power BI as the analysis and insights leg of The Power Platform.
A Power BI dashboard could potentially replace a standing meeting to report on
company metrics such as sales data, progress against goals, or employee
performance.
Microsoft Power Pages
Microsoft Power Pages is a secure, enterprise-grade, low-code software as a
service (SaaS) platform for creating, hosting, and administering modern external-
facing business websites. Whether you're a low-code maker or a professional
developer, Power Pages enables you to rapidly design, configure, and publish
websites that seamlessly work across web browsers and devices. Power Pages
provides you with rich customizable templates, a fluid visual experience through
a reimagined design studio and an integrated learning hub to quickly build sites
that suit your unique business needs.
Power Pages is the newest member of the Microsoft Power Platform family. With
Power Pages, you can build sites by using the same shared business data stored
in Microsoft Dataverse that you use for building apps, workflows, intelligent
virtual agents, reports, and analytics with other Power Platform components in
your organization.
Supporting tools
In addition to the products listed, there are other tools that enhance the solutions
you create on the Power Platform. Some of these are:
 Microsoft Copilot Studio is a low-code tool that brings together a set of
powerful conversational capabilities from custom GPTs, to generative AI
plugins, to manual topics, which can be used to customize Microsoft
Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build standalone copilots.
  Connectors enable you to connect apps, data, and devices in the cloud.
Consider connectors as the bridge across which information and
commands travel. Connectors are used by Power Apps, Power Automate
flow, and logic apps. There are more than 1,000 prebuilt connectors for
Power Platform, enabling all your data and actions to connect cohesively.
Examples of popular connectors include Salesforce, Office 365, Twitter,
Dropbox, Google services, and more.
 AI Builder allows users and developers to add AI capabilities to the
workflows and Power Apps they create and use. AI Builder is a turnkey
solution that allows you to easily add intelligence to your workflows or
apps and predict outcomes to help improve business performance without
writing code.
 Dataverse is a scalable data service and app platform, which lets users
securely store and manage data from multiple sources and integrate that
data in business applications using a common data model to ensure ease
and consistency to users. Microsoft Dataverse is the common currency
that enables the components of Power Platform to work together. It’s the
foundation that enables the consolidation, display, and manipulation of
data.
 Power FX is the low-code programming language that is used across
Power Platform.
 Managed Environments are selected, secure, and isolated environments
within Power Platform. Mananged Environments allow organizations to
build, test, and deploy applications while maintaining control over data
and resources.
Now that we introduced you to the primary elements of the Microsoft Power
Platform, let’s examine how the Power Platform provides business value to
organizations.
Describe the business value of the Power Platform
Completed100 XP
 8 minutes
Many organizations struggle with building solutions that help their users be
successful. Not only do they struggle trying to modernize their systems, but they
simply don't have the resources required to meet the ever-changing needs of
businesses today. With demands for targeted applications at an all-time high and
labor shortages, it isn't uncommon to see application demand up to five times
what departments can realistically deliver.
This demand for applications and resources isn't the only challenge facing
enterprises today. As the business climate changes, new factors are impacting
businesses.
These impacts include:
 Changing workforce expectations: As millennials and Gen Z come to
represent most of the workforce, organizations need to adapt to fit the
 way they work. They grew up in a world of tailored experiences and
collaborating through social media. To best apply their abilities,
organizations need to be able to deliver more custom, streamlined, and
collaborative digital experiences.
 Increased costs for custom application development: Building
custom applications is time consuming and expensive. Not only do you
need to factor in the costs to initially custom develop an application, but
you need to factor in the costs to maintain it.
 Need to become more agile: Historically, solutions can take months to
build and roll out. Once deployed, it can take weeks to implement every
minor change. We no longer have that luxury. Business strategies and
needs change rapidly, so organizations need to be able to quickly build
solutions based on those changing needs.
 Need to scale development efficiently: To meet ever changing needs,
organizations need to change how they develop solutions. By responsibly
enabling citizen developers (power users) as part of development
processes, we can create hybrid development teams that empower the
entire organization to grow.
The Power Platform makes it easy for organizations to address all the challenges
mentioned. The combination of low code tools, along with the ability to use
enterprise level application development tools, provides a collaborative solution.
Citizen developers and professional developers can work together to build
targeted solutions, based on needs of the people who use these applications
every day.
For example, technicians in the field might encounter scenarios in which they
need a mechanical part to execute a job. Ideally if that part is in inventory, they
can easily request the part so they can continue to work. However, many times,
there's a bottleneck in this process. Often, the technicians would need to first
submit a request. This delay means to wait for the person in charge of the
inventory to respond, only to find out later that the part isn't in stock.
This delay could be easily solved by building a dedicated app using Power Apps.
By being able to check inventory levels while onsite, technicians don't have to
spend time waiting to determine if the part is available. Not only can they see
the inventory, but they can also easily request any part as needed. Since the
technicians best understand what they need to complete the job at hand, they
can use their first-hand knowledge to build out a prototype of the application
using Power Apps. Technicians can choose the best user interface and overall
experience. This process is something that the developer traditionally starts.
However, by providing the technicians with the ability to create a functional app,
they can easily get started with a working concept. Once the prototype is built,
professional developers can then fill in any potential gaps that go beyond the
technician’s technical ability. The professional developers can create the APIs
that do the real-time checking of the company’s inventory system. The APIs can
be easily added to Power Apps and Power Automate. This collaborative approach
to creating solutions is often referred to as fusion development, allowing
organizations to use the best resources for the required task.
The image provides an example of the fusion development approach.

Using a low code/no code approach minimizes the amount of time that
development resources spend working on items like screens, automations, and
more. This efficiency frees them up to focus on the more advanced portions of
the solution where their skills are more appropriately used. With over 900
prebuilt connectors, Power Platform helps to simplify integration with both
internal and external systems. These connectors mean that organizations don't
need to build custom integration solutions from the ground up, which can be
costly to maintain.
In addition to cost benefits, the Power Platform helps to increase performance
and efficiency. The flexibility of the platform lets you build applications and
solutions that meet your business initiatives and goals. For example, a dedicated
time management Power App could be quickly created to ensure that everyone is
capturing their time on projects the same way. This means that the potential for
data entry errors would be dramatically reduced. Integrated approvals that are
built on Power Automate ensure that items are being automatically routed to the
right person. Time off requests, for instance, can then be approved or rejected as
quickly as possible.
Power Platform helps organizations build solutions that meet their ever-changing
needs. Power Platform increases business agility by allowing organizations to
quickly build applications in hours or days, as opposed to weeks or months. This
speed of development ensures that by the time the solutions are created, it is
still something that provides value. The business value typically extends
improvement in multiple value drivers, such as performance improvement,
direct/indirect cost savings, risk mitigation, and business transformation.
The speed of app development allows organizations to have a library of
applications to facilitate day-to-day operations. These apps might include
solutions for frontline worker scenarios like facilities management back-office
administrative solutions like personnel management and employee onboarding,
and many more.
Explore connectors and Microsoft Dataverse
Completed100 XP
 9 minutes
Typically, when organizations are building business solutions, how the solution
works and performs can be impacted by several factors. Two of those areas are
connecting to data sources and managing business data. Power Platform
includes two tools, data connectors and Microsoft Dataverse that make these
areas easier. Data connecters make it easy to connect to data across different
services. Microsoft Dataverse is a business database that not only stores
business data, but also includes other built-in features such as security and
more.
Let’s take a moment and examine each of these elements a little more closely.
Connectors
Creating solutions that span multiple services can create challenges. One of
those challenges is ensuring that you can perform the necessary operations in all
systems. You need to access the service with a valid account, but the account
needs to perform the necessary actions across all services. Let’s look at the
following document processing example.
A building management uses vendors to perform services at their buildings, such
as cleaning properties after tenants leave and providing landscaping services at
their properties. After the jobs are completed, vendors send invoices to the
building management company. The building management company might want
to automate processing invoices from vendors.
Currently the process is as follows:
 Invoices are received as email attachments. The management company
uses Microsoft Exchange for processing emails.
 These attachments are downloaded and stored in Microsoft SharePoint.
 Each invoice is sent to a specific person for approval. Approval is made in
Microsoft Teams.
 Once approved, the invoices are entered into the company’s ERP system.
The management company uses Oracle.
 Once entered, a confirmation email with the invoice number must be sent
back to the vendor.
Automating a process like this requires interaction with multiple services. There
are likely different accounts being used with each service, and different data
operation that are being executed. In this example, we would be working with at
least four different services.
 Office 365 Outlook: First, you would need to monitor a specific Microsoft
Exchange mailbox.
 Microsoft SharePoint: Attachments are downloaded and saved to a
specific folder in Microsoft SharePoint.
 Microsoft Teams: Invoice approval requests are sent to managers in
Microsoft Teams, where they can either approve or deny the request.
 Oracle: Once approved, the new invoice is created in Oracle. Details of
the invoice are stored so they can be used later.
 Office 365 Outlook: A confirmation email is sent using a dedicated
mailbox to the company that submitted the invoice.
With Power Platform, data connectors make working with different data sources
easier. They act as the bridge between data sources and your app or workflow.
Power Platform has more than 900 connectors available to various data sources.
Connectors also include a series of actions that simplify the process of working
with those data sources. For example, the Office 365 Outlook connector has
prebuilt actions for working with mailboxes, such as downloading attachments,
sending emails, managing events, and more. When using a connector, you just
need to provide some basic details about the action you want to complete. Data
connectors are used throughout Power Platform. For example, in Power Apps,
they are used to connect apps to data. A company might create an order
fulfillment application for their employees who work in the field. Data connectors
would be used to connect the app to data sources like an SQL database or
Microsoft Dataverse. In Power Automate, data connectors can be used to connect
to data sources that are used as either triggers or actions.
Microsoft Dataverse
Microsoft Dataverse allows organizations to securely store and manage data
used by your business applications. Dataverse data is stored in tables. A table is
a set of rows and columns. Each column in a table stores specific type of data
such as names, locations, ages, dates, salaries, and so on. In addition to data
storage, Dataverse also has other elements that help with securing data, data
validation, and productivity.
Each Dataverse instance includes a base set of standard tables that cover typical
business scenarios such as accounts, contacts, and activities. This base set of
tables reduces the amount of time that it takes for organizations to start building
solutions since there are already standard business tables available. Additionally,
organizations can create custom tables specific to their needs and populate them
with data.
For example:
 A real estate company might create tables to store the properties they
sell, represent open houses, or store showings.
 A financial company might add tables to represent loan applications or
bank accounts.
 An auto repair company might add tables to represent the parts they sell
or the services they provide.
Once the tables are created, application makers can use tools like Power Apps to
build rich business applications that use this data. For example, a real estate
company might create a property management application for their agents
working in the field. The app would provide agents with access to the properties
stored in Dataverse.
Using Dataverse provides these benefits:
 Easy to manage: Both the metadata and data are stored in the cloud.
 Easy to secure: Data is securely stored so users can only access what
they need to. Role-based security allows you to control access to tables for
different users within your organization.
 Rich metadata: Data types and relationships are used directly within
Power Apps.
 Logic and validation: Define calculated columns, business rules,
workflows, and business process flows to ensure data quality and drive
business processes.
  Productivity tools: Tables are available within the add-ins for Microsoft
Excel to increase productivity and ensure data accessibility.
Many solutions built on Power Platform use both Dataverse and connectors
heavily. Dataverse acts as the primary business data storage mechanism, and
connectors are used in the different apps and automations that are connecting to
different data services.
Use Artificial Intelligence to increase productivity
Completed100 XP
 5 minutes
Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how companies do business. AI provides
organizations with important insights about their organization and streamlines
how individuals do their work. Microsoft Copilot uses AI to help individuals
communicate their needs using natural language with relevant assistance
provided in return.
Copilot is used throughout the Microsoft Power Platform. With Copilot, tasks such
as building applications are as simple as just describing what you need the
application to do through multiple steps of conversation. Copilot not only helps
designers, but it also helps end users be more productive. Users can use Copilot
inside applications to help them locate and analyze data, and streamline how
they perform daily tasks.
Let’s look at some of the ways Copilot helps organizations move forward.
Simplify app creation
With Copilot, it's easy and efficient to build an application. There’s no need to
manually build out every element, you just describe the app that you want to
build, and AI designs it for you. You receive in-app guidance using natural
language processing to help build the app that best meets your needs.
When you build a new application, the AI assistant is on the Power Apps home
screen. Tell the AI assistant the type of information you want to collect and track.
The assistant generates a Dataverse table and uses it to build your canvas app.

Use Copilot in Power Apps

A user working in a Power Apps application might have questions about their
data. For example, a real-estate user might need to know the number of total
properties.

Copilot in Power Automate

Cloud flows designer, a feature of Copilot, helps you easily get started building
Power Automate flows. Using your own natural language in multiple steps of
conversation, you can create automations that help streamline your workflow.
The cloud flows designer in Copilot simplifies design and:
 Creates a flow based on the scenario prompt you provide.
 Sets up any connections on your behalf.
  Applies the necessary parameters in the flow based on your prompt.
 Makes changes to your flow, such as updating or replacing actions.
 Answers questions about your flow and product.
For example, you can ask Copilot questions about your flow, such as: What does
my flow do? How do I access child flows? How do I access licenses?

Using Copilot in Copilot Studio

Copilot is changing how people work. The Power Virtual Agents AI builds your bot
based on the description of your topics that you create or iterate. You can quickly
create and deploy a functional bot without authoring multiple topics manually.

The items mentioned represent just a few ways that Copilot can be used with the
Power Platform. More use cases and scenarios are being added all the time.
Explore the business value of the Power Fx
Completed100 XP
 4 minutes
Power Fx is the low-code language that is used throughout Microsoft Power
Platform. It’s a general-purpose, strong-typed, declarative, and functional
programming language expressed in human-friendly text. This ease of use
enables a typical end-user to learn, understand, and work with Power Fx.
Power Fx binds objects together like how formulas are created in Microsoft Excel.
For example, in Microsoft Excel, you might use a formula to control what is
displayed in a cell. Enter the formula =IF(I45="Text","True","False") into cell
I46 and it displays its value based on the contents of cell I45. If cell I45 has the
word Text, the formula displays the word True in I46. If I45 doesn't have the word
Text in it, it displays False in I46. You can think of the Visible property of a UI
control in a Canvas app in a similar way. By using the
expression If(IsBlank(“Property Name”.Text),false,true) on a control called
Asking Price, you're evaluating if a control called Property Name has any text in
it. If it doesn't, the Asking Price control isn't displayed in the app. If it does, then
the Asking Price Control is displayed in the app. As values in the canvas app
change, the formula logic recalculates the value automatically, like how a
spreadsheet does, which affects the control's visibility.
Power Fx is used throughout Microsoft Power Platform. Examples include:
 Power Apps: As mentioned previously, Power Fx is the foundational
language used when building Canvas apps in Power Apps. It's used to
control almost every aspect of a canvas application, including:
o defining when a control is visible

o filtering the contents of a gallery

o performing advanced calculations

o and more

 Microsoft Dataverse: It can be used to build calculated columns in

Dataverse tables. For example, in Dataverse, In Dataverse, you can create
a table to store line items for sales orders. To calculate the total price of
each line item, you can create a Power Fx formula that multiplies the
current list price of the product by the quantity of product defined on the
line-item record.
 Copilot Studio: Power Fx formulas are used when building out topics in
Copilot Studio. They're used to do things like set variables, create
advanced conditional logic, and more. For example, a restaurant can use
Copilot Studio to build a copilot that can take customer reservations.
Customers may only make reservations a maximum of 14 days in
advance. Using Power Fx, you can verify that the reservation date
requested by a customer is within the next 14 days. If it isn't, you can
 provide the user with feedback that they're not within our reservation
window, and instructions for what to do next.
The examples mentioned are only a few of the different ways that Power Fx can
be used. Power Fx makes it easy for anyone to build powerful solutions on
Microsoft Power Platform.
Describe how Power Platform works with Microsoft 365 apps and
services
Completed100 XP
 3 minutes
Organizations around the world use Microsoft technologies in the enterprise
capacity. They often use Microsoft 365 for as their email and productivity
platform. They might also use SharePoint as their document management
platform. Because of the pervasive use of Microsoft 365 services, there are
multiple built-in scenarios where the Power Platform can help you to create a
more streamlined solution by interacting directly with Microsoft 365 services.
Power Platform includes multiple connectors that are designed to work with
Microsoft 365 services.
Just a few of the connectors available include:
 Office 365 Outlook
 Office 365 Users
 Excel
 SharePoint
Administrators, managers, and end users can use these connectors to become
more productive. During any given day, a typical end user can receive more than
100 emails. Many of those incoming emails have attachments that need to be
saved somewhere, such as a SharePoint site or a OneDrive folder. With Power
Platform, a user could easily create a Power Automate flow that monitors their
inbox for incoming emails with attachments. When attachments are detected,
the flow could locate the appropriate customer folders in SharePoint and
automatically save the attachments there. If that process manually takes 1 to 2
minutes and is being done 20 to 30 times per day, this illustration alone could
save up to 2 hours a week. This is just one of many examples.
Many organizations still use Microsoft Excel to run entire departments. Excel’s
formula capabilities and the ability to create elements such as Charts and Pivot
tables make it easy for managers to keep track of daily items. Unfortunately,
getting data into Microsoft Excel is often a manual process consisting of copying
and pasting data from different applications into Excel. In some cases, it needs
the user to manually enter the data. In some industries, end users spend 5 to 10
hours a week just entering data into Excel. With the personal productivity
automation tools available from the Power Platform, end users can automate the
process of capturing this data and entering it into Excel. Power Automate
Desktop flows mimic the keystrokes and mouse clicks on behalf of the user. Now,
data entry tasks that took minutes could take seconds, freeing the users to work
on other items.
There are just some of the many different examples of where Power Platform can
be used with Microsoft 365 apps and services.
Explore how Power Platform works with Microsoft Teams
Completed100 XP
 7 minutes
When COVID-19 hit the world, organizations were forced to rethink how their
work force gets things done. Many organizations switched their workers to work
remotely. This introduced a need for better collaborative tools organizations can
utilize.
Microsoft Teams fills that need for many organizations. It provides a central point
where users can collaborate with other users, have meetings, manage projects,
and more. One key advantage of Microsoft Teams is how extensible and
adaptable it is. This means organizations can build custom applications for Teams
based on the needs of their users. Microsoft Power Platform is the innovative
gateway to rapidly build Teams compatible apps using low-code attributes. All
Power Platform components can be used with Microsoft Teams.

Let’s examine them in a little more detail.

 Power BI: The Power BI tab for Microsoft Teams adds support for reports
in the Teams workspace and allows users to share interactive Power BI
content and collaborate with others in Teams channels and chats. You can
create packaged Power BI app content from scratch and distribute it as an
app or create a template app in Power BI. Additionally, use the new Power
 BI app in Teams to bring your entire basic Power BI service experience into
Teams.
 Power Apps: The Power Apps app in Teams provides an integrated
experience for app makers to create and edit apps and workflows within
Teams. They can quickly publish and share the apps with team members.
The members can use the apps without having to switch between multiple
apps and services. For example, a company might create an incident
reporting application that can be accessed directly from Microsoft Teams.
When a user needs to report an incident, they can do so without ever
needing to leave Microsoft Teams.
 Power Automate: You can create flows to automate repetitive work tasks
directly within the Teams environment with the Power Automate app in
Teams. You can trigger a flow from any message in Microsoft Teams and
use Adaptive Cards within Power Automate. Additionally, you can build
flows to customize and add further value to Microsoft Teams from within
the new Power Apps app in Teams.
 Copilot Studio: You can create, manage, and publish conversational
copilots (chatbots) easily from within Teams. You can share copilots with
other people in your organization to chat and get answers for their
questions.
 Dataverse for Teams: Dataverse for Teams is a built-in, low-code data
platform that empowers users to build custom apps, bots, and flows
directly in Microsoft Teams with Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and
Power Automate.
Let’s look at an example.
Since the global pandemic hit in 2020, real estate companies have dramatically
changed how they do business. First, all their real estate agents are remote
workers now. Most of them come into the office once per month at the most.
Since most of their workforce is mobile, being able to collaborate with team
members is more important than ever. Their agents spend most of their day
working in Microsoft Teams. It's important that they not only collaborate with
other employees, but also perform day-to-day activities. By using Power Platform
with Teams, we can provide real estate agents with the following capabilities:
 Dedicated Copilots embedded in Microsoft Teams can answer agent
questions and help them with day-to-day tasks. For example, a copilot can
answer questions about open house protocols and assist agents with
scheduling open houses.
 A dedicated expense submission app can be built using Dataverse for
Teams to help agents submit expenses related to travel, staging, and open
houses right for Teams.
 Power BI reports that provide analytics around properties can be easily
embedded inside Microsoft Teams.
In the image, we can see a dedicated chat bot inside Microsoft Teams that helps
answer agents’ questions related to different things such as open house
scheduling protocols.

C
Describe how Power Platform works with Microsoft Dynamics 365 apps
Completed100 XP
 5 minutes
Dynamics 365 is a set of intelligent business applications that help organizations
run their entire business and deliver greater results through predictive, AI-driven
insights. From Finance and Intelligent Order Management to Sales and Customer
Service, Dynamics 365 has various enterprise resource planning (ERP) and
customer engagement applications.
There are many ways that the Power Platform works with Dynamics 365
products. First, all Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps are model-driven
applications. These apps are based on a data model store within the Microsoft
Dataverse. Model-driven applications are built using Power Apps. Components
such as forms, views, charts, and dashboards are used to present data to end
users.
Model-driven applications aren't the only component of the Power Platform used
by Dynamics 365 applications. Other Power Platform tools and components used
by Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps can include:
 Power BI: You can connect Power BI to Dynamics 365 applications to gain
important insight into an organization. You can embed Power BI
visualizations into Dynamics 365 Sales or Dynamics 365 Customer
Service.
 Power Automate: Business process flows are the primary component in
Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps. These flows help guide you to
get work done. For example, Dynamics 365 Sales includes a business
 process flow that guides sellers to begin with a lead and end with a closed
sale.
 Copilot Studio: Intelligent copilots are becoming a regular part of
customer support organizations. They can answer specific customer
questions to reduce the workload for agents. Applications such as
Dynamics 365 Customer Service can provide support across multiple
channels to easily direct incoming phone calls, SMS, or Facebook
messages to a copilot first. The copilot can then escalate to a live
customer service agent working in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, as
needed.
 Power Pages: Many organizations provide customers with self-support
options where customers can access a portal and find answers to
questions, engage with support, or even open new support tickets. Power
Pages makes it easy for organizations to create externally facing sites that
connect to Dataverse that customers can access.
The image shows an example of a Power BI dashboard displaying work order
data that was automatically created. The Visualize in Power BI feature used is
built into model-driven applications such as Dynamics 365 Field Service.

Explore how Microsoft Power Platform apps work together

Completed100 XP
 12 minutes
Power Platform can add value to any business by helping you to act, automate,
and analyze. Act by building custom apps in Power Apps, automate processes
based on the data you collect in Power Automate, and analyze the data you
collected in Power BI.
Consider a business that has IT equipment for general use. Currently, equipment
check-out is conducted by visiting the IT office, checking if the product is
available, then writing your name with the equipment type in a notebook.
Employees might have to visit IT several times before equipment becomes
available. They must drop their tasks to personally check on the equipment
status or collect it for the employee. Sometimes employees hold onto the
equipment for longer than they intend, and IT personnel spend time tracking it
down. In addition, important equipment information such as serial numbers and
warranty details are kept somewhere else in the IT office. How can Power
Platform improve this process?
Power Apps allows you to build an app that has all equipment listed, the status of
that equipment, and important details like instructions for use. With their phone
or tablet, employees check out the available equipment then walk to IT at a
specified pickup time, where the equipment is ready along with all the necessary
notes. Power Automate reads when equipment needs to be returned and sends
reminder emails to the employees. Users see when equipment is booked through
the app and request check-out for a future date. Power BI takes all the data
generated from the app and analyzes it to help your IT leaders understand what
equipment is used most often and by whom. These insights help you decide if
you need to purchase extra equipment, if some users or departments need
dedicated equipment, and when your equipment reached the end of its
usefulness.
This is only one common scenario in which Power Platform can transform the way
businesses operate.
To expand on this a little more, let’s look at another example. Consider a real
estate company that has a team of agents who work in the field meeting with
potential sellers and showing properties to buyers. In addition to the company's
agents, they have a team of managers who are there to support their agents.
The real estate company's agents need to have the following capabilities:
 Quickly search for active property listings while in the field.
 Easily intake new properties when working with new sellers.
 Capture property details, snap pictures, and schedule open houses as
needed.
The real estate company's managers need to have the following capabilities:
 Easily see which properties are currently listed.
 Ensure that property inspections are conducted as needed.
 Access important details such as how many offers were made on a
property and manage any incoming offers.
 Easily identify similar properties in the area.
 Analyze the current landscape of properties they’re selling, and drive
business decisions based on those actions.
The real estate company uses core Microsoft 365 apps:
 Microsoft Outlook is their primary email application.
  Real estate agents spend a large portion of their day working in Microsoft
Teams.
Let’s see how Power Platform creates a tailored solution for the real estate
company employees, providing tools that help them with their various needs.
Create a solution in Power Platform
Now that you see a few different examples, consider your own business and what
processes take up valuable time that burden customers or employees. How can
you use Microsoft Power Platform to improve them?
Describe how Power Platform solutions consume Microsoft Azure
services
Completed100 XP
 5 minutes
The Azure cloud platform consists of hundreds of products and cloud services
designed to help you bring new solutions to life to solve today's and future
challenges. These services range from data storage services to virtual machines,
to artificial intelligence services. Microsoft Azure service provides you with the
opportunity to build, run, and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-
premises, and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of your choice.
Power Platform and Azure services are a perfect complement for each other, and
the possibilities for using them together are endless. Azure services can be used
with Power Platform to help modernize legacy systems, automate processes, and
create advanced analytical solutions.
Let’s look at an example of how an organization might use Azure and Power
Platform.
The example demonstrates how you can deploy portals to automate manual or
paper-based processes and create a rich user experience. Employ Azure API
management and Azure Functions to connect custom APIs, which tap into your
legacy systems. By using Azure-managed databases and a low-code approach to
automate tasks, you can lower the overall solution costs. You can quickly build
apps that are real-time, resilient, and scalable.
The data flows through the solution as follows:
1. The airline system communicates with a custom API hosted in Azure API
Management.
2. A custom API coordinator receives notifications and handles incoming
messages from the airline system, assigning flights to Microsoft Teams
channels and sending them to Power Apps.
3. The system queues a Graph API call in an Azure Storage Account queue for
further processing when a user selects a flight to monitor, or when the
system assigns the user to a flight
4. Azure Functions runs the Graph API calls based on the incoming messages
in the storage queue, sending notifications to Teams, and also streams all
events to an Azure Event Hubs for further analytics.
5. The airline's notification system uses a custom bot messaging service that
employs Azure Bot Service.
6. Custom bots send flight updates to users in Teams.
7. An Azure Data Lake storage offers long-term retention and micro-batch
processing of events from Event Hubs, ultimately generating insightful
reports with Power BI.
Microsoft Power Platform enables your business to craft solutions while
empowering you to unite customized technology to help everyone, from the CEO
to the frontline workers, drive the business with data. To understand how to
begin creating solutions with the Microsoft Power Platform, it's important to
understand some of the key foundational elements involved in creating solutions.
In this module, we will:

Examine different Power Platform administrative options

Describe security and governance in Power Platform

Explore Microsoft Dataverse and how to use it to build business solutions

Examine Power Platform connectors

Describe Power Platform administration

Completed100 XP
 13 minutes
Power Platform environments
In Power Platform, environments are used to store, manage, and share your
organization's business data, apps, and flows. Each environment allows you to
provision one Microsoft Dataverse database for use within that environment.
Microsoft Dataverse environments allow you to manage user access, security
settings, and the storage that is associated with that database.
Each environment is created under a Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)
tenant. Only users within that tenant can access its resources. An environment is
also bound to a geographic location, like the United States. When you create a
Microsoft Dataverse database in an environment, that database is created within
datacenters in that geographic location. Any items that you create in that
environment (including connections, gateways, flows that are using Power
Automate, and more) are also bound to their environment's location.

You can create more than one environment to manage solution development and
data storage by setting up one environment for development, another for
testing, and another for production use. The development environment is for
developers to create solutions. Once the solutions are ready for testing, they're
moved to another environment called test. A separate environment ensures that
everything can be tested without impacting users. Once the solution is ready, it
can be moved to production. Also, you can set up an environment based on a
geographical location. For example, you might set up an environment for Europe
and another for Asia. Each of these environments has zero or only one instance
of Microsoft Dataverse.
Administrative experiences
Microsoft Power Platform has a rich set of administrative experiences that can be
used to administer the different aspects of your solution. From the Power
Platform admin center, you can create new environments or manage security.
From the maker portals you can manage Microsoft Dataverse. Depending on
what you want to do, there's a targeted administrative experience for it. Let’s
examine the many different experiences available.
Microsoft Power Platform admin center
The Power Platform admin center (Https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com) is
the primary administrative experience for the Microsoft Power Platform. The
portal allows administrators to manage their environments and configure many
of the primary settings for Power Apps, Power Automate, and customer
engagement apps for Dynamics 365.
In the Power Platform admin center, settings are grouped into broad categories
and are accessed by selecting the link on the left-hand side of the portal. These
categories are:
 Home: Provides overall information, such as if there are any services
disruptions, etc. Different cards can be added to better personalize this
screen based on your needs.
 Environments: This section lists all the environments in this tenant. This
includes Microsoft Dataverse environments and other environments such
as Dataverse for Teams environments.
 Analytics: This section provides analytical details about Microsoft Power
Platform such as Dataverse analytics, Power Automate Flow Statistics, and
Power Apps details.
 Billing: The billing center contains details related to user licenses.
 Settings: This section lets you review and manage settings at a tenet
level, such as being able to control who can create and manage the
different types of environments available.
 Resources: This section is where you can view capacity statistics for your
tenant and manage and install features related to Dynamics 365
applications.
 Help + Support: This section is where you can create new support
requests and manage any existing requests previously submitted.
  Data integration: This section lets you create or add predefined
connections and monitor these connections between Microsoft Dataverse
and other data stores like Salesforce or SQL Server.
 Data: This section is where you can manage the different data sources,
on-premises data gateways, and virtual network data gateways associated
with this tenant.
 Policies: This section is where you can manage some of the different data
security policies and other security features, such as the Customer
Lockbox and tenant isolation.
 Admin Centers: Provides access to the different admin centers that can
impact Microsoft Power Platform solutions such as the Microsoft 365 admin
center, Azure active directory, and more.

Other admin and maker portals

In addition to the Power Platform admin center, there are several different
administrative experiences that can be used as part of Power Platform. Each
experience is designed based on the product you're working with. For example,
the primary experience used to make applications and manage the Dataverse
instance associated with an environment is the Power Apps maker portal
(Https://make.powerapps.com).
In the image, you can see an example of the maker portal displaying the
different model and canvas applications that are currently deployed to this
environment.
The Power Apps maker portal also provides for the following items:
 Tables: Allows you to manage the Microsoft Dataverse tables deployed in
this environment. You can easily create new tables and perform tasks such
as modifying the different forms, views, and relationships in the Dataverse
instance.
 Connections: Allows you to manage the connections being used by apps
in this environment.
 Flows: Provides access to any flows created for this environment.
 Chatbots: Provides access to any chatbots created for this environment.
 AI Models: Provides access to AI builder models for this environment.
 Solutions: Provides access to any Solutions deployed to this environment.
 Cards: Provides access to Cards created in this environment.
 Choices: Allows you to manage the choice columns in this environment.
 Connections: Allows you to manage the connectors used in this
environment.
 Dataflows: Provides access to Dataflows used in this environment.
 Power Platform: Provides access to other Power Platform Maker portals.
Items in the middle section can be pinned and displayed as needed. For
example, if your organization isn't doing anything with Cards, you can choose to
not display the middle section. If you access it, you can select more items, which
are then displayed displayed.
Each of the primary Power Platform components has a corresponding maker
portal. The table provides a list of the different maker portals available.
Expand table

Product URL Description

Power Automate https://make.powerautomate.com Used to create and

manage the Cloud and
Product URL Description

Desktop flows deployed.

Power BI https://app.powerbi.com Used to create and

manage Power BI reports
and dashboards.

Power Pages https:// Used to create modern,

make.powerpages.microsoft.com secure business websites
that can be used by
employees and
customers.

Microsoft Copilot https:// Used to create intelligent

Studio (formerly web.powerva.microsoft.com copilots that can be used
Power Virtual by employees and
Agents) customers.

Explore the different portals

Now that we'e talked about the different administrative experiences available,
let’s see how to work with them. In the following video, we walk through some of
the basic elements in the Power Platform admin center and introduce some of
the other maker portals available.
Power Platform admin center
Managed Environments
Managing applications at an enterprise level can be challenging. It can be hard to
control who has access to different applications and ensure the data in those
applications is secure. To help resolve this challenge, Microsoft Power Platform
includes Managed Environments. Managed Environments is a suite of premium
level capabilities admins can use to manage Power Platform at scale. They
provide more control over the environment with less effort, and more insights
related to what is happening. Any Power Platform environment can be a
Managed Environment. Once the administrator enables the Managed
Environment, other features become available that administrators can configure.
These features cover different elements across Power Platform.
Key features available in a Managed Environment include:
 Limit sharing: Allows administrators to limit how broadly users can share
canvas apps. For example, you can prevent a user from sharing a canvas
app with the entire organization.
 Weekly usage insights: Every week analytics are delivered to your
mailbox. These analytics include information about your top apps, your
most impactful makers, and details about inactive resources that you can
safely clean up.
 Data policies: Data policies define the consumer connectors that data
can be shared with. They ensure data is managed in a uniform manner
across your organization. Additionally, they also prevent important
 business data from being accidentally published to connectors like social
media sites.
 Pipelines in Power Platform: Power Platform administrators can create
one or more pipelines, associate any number of environments, then share
access with those individuals that administers or run pipelines.
 Solution checker: Solution checker in Managed Environments is used to
enforce rich static analysis checks on your solutions against a set of best
practice rules and identify problematic patterns.
The items mentioned represent a small portion of what Managed Environments
provides. Increased capabilities are being added regularly. You can find the most
recent list of Managed Environment capabilities here: Managed Environments
overview.
Describe Power Platform security and governance
Completed100 XP
 5 minutes
Power Platform data privacy and accessibility
Organizations want to know that their data isn't going to be compromised. For
example, you don’t want to accidentally pass through sensitive information in an
application. The Microsoft Online Services Terms and the Microsoft Enterprise
Privacy Statement govern the Power Platform service. For the location of data
processing, refer to the Microsoft Online Services Terms and the Data Protection
Addendum.
The Microsoft Trust Center is the primary resource for Power Platform compliance
information. Learn more at Microsoft Compliance Offerings.
The Power Platform service follows the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL).
SDL is a set of strict practices that support security assurance and compliance
requirements. Learn more
at https://www.microsoft.com/securityengineering/sdl/practices.
Data loss prevention policies
Your organization's data is likely one of the most important assets you're
responsible for safeguarding as an administrator. The ability to build apps and
automation to use that data is a large part of your company's success. You can
use Power Apps and Power Automate for rapid build and rollout of these high-
value apps so that users can measure and act on the data in real time. Apps and
automation are becoming increasingly connected across multiple data sources
and multiple services. Some of these apps might be external, third-party services
and might even include some social networks. Users generally have good
intentions. However, they can easily overlook the potential for exposure from
data leakage to services and audiences that shouldn't have access to the data.
Data loss prevention (DLP) policies act as guardrails to help prevent users from
unintentionally exposing organizational data. DLP policies can be defined at the
environment or tenant level, offering flexibility to craft sensible policies that
strike the right balance between protection and productivity. Connectors can be
classified as follows:
 Business: Connectors that host business -use data.
 Non-Business: Connectors that host personal-use data.
 Blocked: Connectors that you want to restrict usage across one or more
environments.
When a new policy is created, all connectors are defaulted to the non-
Business group. From there, they can be moved to Business or Blocked based
on your preference. You can manage connectors when you create or modify the
properties of a DLP policy from the Microsoft Power Platform admin center. These
affect Microsoft Power Platform canvas apps and Power Automate flows.
Compliance and data privacy
Microsoft is committed to the highest levels of trust, transparency, standards
conformance, and regulatory compliance. Microsoft’s broad suite of cloud
products and services are all built from the ground up to address the most
rigorous security and privacy demands of our customers.
Microsoft provides the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings
(including certifications and attestations) of any cloud service provider. These
offerings help your organization comply with national, regional, and industry-
specific requirements governing the collection and use of individuals’ data. There
are also tools for administrators to support your organization’s efforts. In this
part of the document, we cover in detail the resources available to help you
determine and achieve your own organization's requirements.
Data Protection
Data in transit between user devices and the Microsoft datacenters are secured.
Connections established between customers and Microsoft datacenters are
encrypted, and all public endpoints are secured using the industry-standard
Transport Security Layer (TLS). TLS effectively establishes a security-enhanced
browser to server connection to ensure data confidentiality and integrity
between desktops and datacenters. API access from the customer endpoint to
the server is also similarly protected. Currently, TLS 1.2 (or higher) is required for
accessing the server endpoints.
Accessibility in Microsoft Power Platform
One of the things that Microsoft values the most is making sure that Power
Platform is accessible and inclusive to all kinds of users all over the world. An
accessible canvas app allows users with vision, hearing, and other impairments
to successfully use the app. In addition to being a requirement for many
governments and organizations, following the below guidelines increases
usability for all users, regardless of their abilities. You can use the Accessibility
Checker to help review potential accessibility issues in your app. For more details
and suggestions on making your canvas apps more accessible, visit Create
accessible canvas apps in Power Apps.
Explore Microsoft Dataverse
Completed100 XP
 14 minutes
Microsoft Dataverse is a cloud-based solution that easily structures various data
and business logic to support interconnected applications and processes in a
secure and compliant manner. Managed and maintained by Microsoft, Dataverse
is available globally but deployed geographically to comply with your potential
data residency. It isn't designed for stand-alone use on your servers, so you need
an internet connection to access and use it.
Dataverse is different from traditional databases in that it's more than just
tables. It incorporates security, logic, data, and storage into a central point. It's
designed to be your central data repository for business data, and you might
even be using it already. Behind the scenes, it powers many Microsoft Dynamics
365 solutions such as Field Service, Customer Insights, Customer Service, and
Sales. It's also available as part of Power Apps and Power Automate with native
connectivity built right in. The AI Builder and Portals features of Microsoft Power
Platform also utilize Dataverse.
The image shows a visualization that brings together the many offerings of
Microsoft Dataverse.

Here's a brief explanation of each category of features.

 Security: Dataverse handles authentication with Azure Active Directory
(Azure AD) to allow for conditional access and multifactor authentication.
It supports authorization down to the row and column level and provides
rich auditing capabilities.
 Logic: Dataverse allows you to easily apply business logic at the data
level. Regardless of how a user interacts with the data, the same rules
 apply. These rules could be related to duplicate detection, business rules,
workflows, or more.
 Data: Dataverse offers you the control to shape your data, allowing you to
discover, model, validate, and report on your data. This control ensures
your data looks the way you want regardless of how it's used.
 Storage: Dataverse stores your physical data in the Azure cloud. This
cloud-based storage removes the burden of worrying about where your
data lives or how it scales. These concerns are all handled for you.
 Integration: Dataverse connects in different ways to support your
business needs. APIs, webhooks, eventing, and data exports give you
flexibility to get data in and out.
As you can see, Microsoft Dataverse is a powerful cloud-based solution for
storing and working with your business data. In the following sections, you look
at Microsoft Dataverse from the lens of data storage for Microsoft Power
Platform, where you start your journey. Keep in mind the other rich capabilities
discussed which you can explore further as your usage increases.
To get started, Microsoft Dataverse lets you create one or many cloud-based
instances of a standardized database. The database includes predefined tables
and columns that store data commonly found across nearly all organizations and
businesses. You can customize and extend what’s stored by adding new columns
or tables. The ease of setting up a Microsoft Dataverse database and
standardized data model under it simplifies your ability to concentrate your
efforts on building solutions without worrying about infrastructure, storage, and
data integration. With your data stored in Microsoft Dataverse, there are many
ways to access it. You can work with the data natively with tools such as Power
Apps or Power Automate. Any business solution can connect to Dataverse using
connectors APIs. With the power of features such as role-based security and
business rules, you can trust your data is safe no matter how it it's accessed.
Scalability
A Dataverse database supports large data sets and complex data models. Tables
can hold millions of items, and you can extend the storage in each instance of a
Microsoft Dataverse database to 4 terabytes. The amount of data available in
your instance of Microsoft Dataverse is based on the number and type of licenses
that are associated with it. Data storage is pooled between all licensed users, so
you can allocate storage as needed for each solution that you build. Incremental
storage can be purchased if you need more storage than what is offered within
standard licensing.
Microsoft Dataverse structure and benefits
The structure of a Microsoft Dataverse database is based upon the definitions
and schema in the Common Data Model. Using the Common Data Model as the
basis of a Microsoft Dataverse database simplifies the integration of solutions
that use a Common Data Model schema. This is because the Common Data
Model is the basis of a Microsoft Dataverse database and uses a Common Data
Model schema. The standard tables of the solution are the same. You can take
advantage of a rich ecosystem of solutions that vendors created from using the
Common Data Model. Best of all, there's practically no limit to how far you can
extend a Microsoft Dataverse database.
Describe tables, columns, and relationships
A table is a logical structure containing rows and columns that represent a set of
data. In the screenshot, you see the standard account table and various
elements that can be managed as part of it.

Types of tables
The three types of tables are:
 Standard - Several standard tables, also known as out-of-box tables, are
included with a Dataverse environment. Account, business unit, contact,
task, and user tables are examples of standard tables in Dataverse. Most
of the standard tables included with Dataverse can be customized.
 Managed - Tables that aren't customizable and are imported into the
environment as part of a managed solution.
 Custom - Custom tables are unmanaged tables that are either imported
from an unmanaged solution or are new tables created directly in the
Dataverse environment.
Columns
Columns store a discrete piece of information within a row in a table. You might
think of them as a column in Excel. Columns have data types, meaning that you
can store data of a certain type in a column that matches that data type. For
example, if you have a solution that requires dates, such as capturing the date of
an event or when something occurred, then you store the date in a column with
the type Date. Similarly, if you want to store a number, then you store the
number in a column with the type of Number.
The number of columns within a table varies from a few columns to a hundred or
more. Every database in Microsoft Dataverse starts with a standard set of tables,
and each standard table has a standard set of columns.
Understand relationships
To make an efficient and scalable solution for most of the solutions that you
build, you need to split up data into different containers (tables). Trying to store
everything in a single container would likely be inefficient and difficult to
understand.
The following example helps illustrate this concept.
Imagine that you need to create a system to manage sales orders. You need a
product list along with the inventory on hand, the cost of the item, and the
selling price. You also need a master list of customers with their addresses and
credit ratings. Finally, you need to manage sales invoices as well to store invoice
data. The invoice should include information such as:
 date
 invoice number
 salesperson
 customer information including address and credit rating
 a line item for each item on the invoice
Each line item should include a reference to the product that you sold. The line
item should also provide the proper cost and price for each product. And finally,
the line should also decrease the quantity on hand based upon the quantity that
you sold in that line item. Creating a single table to support the functionality in
the above example would be inefficient. A better way to approach this business
scenario is to create the following four tables:
 Customers
 Products
 Invoices
 Line items
Creating a table for each of these items and relating them to one another allows
you to build an efficient solution that can scale, while maintaining high
performance. Splitting the data into multiple tables also means that you don't
have to store repetitive data or support huge rows with large amounts of blank
data. Reporting is also much easier if you split the data into separate tables.
Tables that relate to one another have a relational connection. Relationships
between tables exist in many forms, but the two most common are one-to-many
and many-to-many, both of which Microsoft Dataverse supports. To learn more
about the different relationship types, see: Table relationships.
Business logic in Microsoft Dataverse
Many organizations have business logic that impacts how they work with data.
For example, an organization who is using Dataverse to store customer
information might want to make a field such as and Identification number field
required. In Microsoft Dataverse, you build this logic using business rules.
Business rules allow you to apply and maintain business logic at the data layer
instead of the app layer. Basically, when you create business rules in Microsoft
Dataverse, those rules are in effect regardless of where users interact with the
data.
For example, business rules can be used in canvas and model-driven apps to set
or clear values in one or many columns in a table. They can also be used to
validate stored data or show error messages. Model-driven apps can use
business rules to show or hide columns, enable, or disable columns, and create
recommendations based on business intelligence.
Business rules give you a powerful way to enforce rules, set values, or validate
data regardless of the form that is used to input data. Business rules are also
effective in helping to increase the accuracy of data, simplify application
development, and streamline the forms presented to end users.
Consider this example of a simple, yet powerful use of business rules. The
business rule is configured to change the field Credit Limit VP Approver to be
a required field if the Credit Limit is set to greater than $1,000,000. If the credit
limit is less than $1,000,000, then the field is optional.

By applying this business rule at the data level instead of the app level, you have
better control of your data. This ensures your business logic is followed whether
it's being accessed directly from Power Apps, Power Automate, or even via an
API. The rule is tied to the data, not the app.
To learn more about using Business rules in Dataverse, see: Create a business
rule for a table.
Working with dataflows
Dataflows are self-service, cloud-based, data preparation technology. Dataflows
are used to ingest, transform, and load data into Microsoft Dataverse
environments, Power BI workspaces, or your organization's Azure Data Lake
Storage account. Dataflows are created using Power Query, a data connectivity
and preparation experience that is already included in many Microsoft products,
such as Excel and Power BI. Customers can trigger dataflows to run either on
demand or automatically on a schedule, data is always kept up to date.
Because a dataflow stores the resulting entities in cloud-based storage, other
services can interact with the data produced by dataflows.

For example, Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and
Dynamics 365 applications can get the data produced by the dataflow by
connecting to Dataverse, a Power Platform dataflow connector. Alternatively,
they can get the data directly through the lake, depending on the destination
configured at dataflow creation time.
The following list highlights some of the benefits of using dataflows:
 A dataflow decouples the data transformation layer from the modeling and
visualization layer in a Power BI solution.
 The data transformation code can reside in a central location, a dataflow,
rather than be spread out among multiple artifacts.
 A dataflow creator only needs Power Query skills. In an environment with
multiple creators, the dataflow creator can be part of a team that together
builds the entire BI solution or operational application.
 A dataflow is product agnostic. It's not a component of Power BI only, as
you can get its data in other tools and services.
 Dataflows take advantage of Power Query, a powerful, graphical, self-
service data transformation experience.
 Dataflows run entirely in the cloud. No other infrastructure is required.
  You have multiple options for starting to work with dataflows, using
licenses for Power Apps, Power BI, and Customer Insights.
 Dataflows are capable of advanced transformations, but they're designed
for self-service scenarios and require no IT or developer background.
Common Data Model
When creating business solutions, you often need to integrate data across your
organizations different business applications. This cross-app integration can be
challenging at times. While the data is similar, it isn't necessarily stored the
same across different applications. To help simplify this, multiple technology
leaders created the Common Data Model initiative. The goal is to have a
common structure that is easily applied across different applications.
Organizations can create and share their own data types and tags by using
Microsoft’s Common Data Model, which has an extensive metadata system. This
helps capture valuable business insight, which can be integrated and enriched
with data to deliver actionable intelligence.
With the Common Data Model, you can structure your data to represent concepts
and activities that are commonly used and well understood. You can query and
analyze that data, reuse it, and interoperate with other businesses and apps that
use the same format. Organizations can create and share their own data types
and tags by using Microsoft’s Common Data Model, which has an extensive
metadata system.
Instead of building a new data model for your app, you can simply the table
definitions available to you. Common Data Model is used by various applications
and services including Microsoft Dataverse, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power
Platform, and Azure. This commonality of data model ensures that all your
services can access the same data. A fitting example of how to utilize the
Common Data Model is the data-preparation capabilities in Power BI dataflows.
Those dataflows create data files, which follow the Common Data Model
definition. Those data files are stored in Azure Data Lake. The Common Data
Model definitions are open and available to any service or application that wants
to use them.

Data described using the Common Data Model can be used with Azure services
to build scalable analytical solution. It can also be a source of semantically rich
data for applications driving actionable insights, such as Dynamics 365 Customer
Insights. Common Data Model is used to define entities for Dynamics 365
applications in Sales, Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Commerce can be
readily available in Azure Data Lake.
Microsoft continues to extend the Common Data Model in collaboration with
many partners and subject-matter experts. By building industry accelerators,
Microsoft allows the following industries to benefit from the Common Data Model
and the platforms that support it:
 Automotive
 Banking
 Healthcare
 Higher education
 Non-profit
Examine Power Platform connectors
Completed100 XP
 7 minutes
Microsoft Power Platform is made powerful by its ability to use data across many
platforms. To work across multiple data platforms, components of Microsoft
Power Platform use connectors. You can think of connectors as a bridge from
your data source to your app or workflow. This bridge allows information to be
conveyed back and forth. Connectors allow you to extend your business solutions
across platforms and add functionality for your users.
Data Sources
To understand the types of connectors and their capabilities, you must first
understand the types of data sources to which they connect. The two types of
data sources are tabular, and function based.
Tabular data - A tabular data source is one that returns data in a structured
table format. Power Apps can directly read and display these tables through
galleries, forms, and other controls. Additionally, if the data source supports it,
Power Apps can create, edit, and delete data from these data sources. Examples
include Microsoft Dataverse, SharePoint, and SQL Server.
Function-based data - A function-based data source is one that uses functions
to interact with the data source. These functions can be used to return a table of
data but offer more extensive action such as the ability to send an email, update
permissions, or create a calendar event. Examples include Office 365 Users,
Project Online, and Azure Blob Storage.
Both data source types are commonly used to bring data and incremental
functionality to your solutions. As you can see, connecting to data sources allows
you to integrate disparate parts of your business solutions to build them out
cohesively. Now that you understand more about data sources, you're ready to
learn about connectors.
Connectors are the bridges from your data source to your app, workflow, or
dashboard. Microsoft Power Platform has more than 1,000 connectors available
to common data sources. Connectors are divided into standard and premium.
Some popular standard connectors are SharePoint, Outlook, and YouTube.
Premium connectors require added licensing for your app and/or users. A few
premium connectors are SQL Server, Survey Monkey, and Mail Chimp. The
connector reference in the summary and resources unit lists all connectors and
whether they're considered standard or premium. You can also use AppSource to
source and install apps and use the connectors to non-Microsoft services.
Connectors can provide input and output between the data source and Power
Platform, which can accelerate the delivery of Microsoft Power Platform business
solutions. For instance, using Dynamics 365 apps such as Customer Service, you
can set up Power Automate to notify users when specific customer types are
added. Or you can use a SharePoint document library to store files that are fed
into Power Apps to manage and distribute. Microsoft also provides connectors to
their Azure services, providing advanced AI techniques to do tasks such as
reading text off images or cognitive services like recognizing faces in images.
All Microsoft Power Platform business solutions can be used and implemented
into Microsoft 365 apps such as Teams. This integration allows users to play
Power Apps within Teams or run Power Automate from actions and events within
Teams.
Triggers and Actions
Once you established a data source and configured your connector, there are
two types of operations you can use, triggers or actions.
Triggers are only used in Power Automate and prompt a flow to begin. Triggers
can be time based, such as a Power Automate flow that begins every day at 8:00
am. They could be based off an action like creating a new row in a table or
receiving an email. You always need a trigger to tell your workflow when to run.
Actions are used in Power Automate and Power Apps. Actions are prompted by
the user or a trigger and allow interaction with your data source by some
function. For example, an action would be sending an email in your workflow or
app writing a new line to a data source.
Now that you understand what connectors are and how to use them, examine
the different connectors available.
Types of connectors
Standard Connectors
Standard tier connectors are connectors that are included in your standard
Microsoft 365 subscription. Standard connectors cover many of the most used
data sources such as SharePoint, OneDrive, and Power BI and third-party data
sources such as Google Drive, Twitter, GitHub, and more.
Premium Connectors
While standard connectors are available with a standard Microsoft 365
subscription, premium connectors are only available when you have the
appropriate standalone plans. These plans include a Power Apps per user plan, or
a Power Automate per user plan. The main advantage of premium connectors is
that they allow you to connect to a larger number of services. Most premium
connectors cover external applications such as Salesforce, DocuSign, Survey
Monkey, Amazon, and so on. There are several Microsoft applications that use
premium connectors such as Dynamics 365. The premium stamp identifies
premium connectors.
Custom Connectors
If any of the over 1,000 connectors don't provide you with what you need, you
can build a custom connector. Custom connectors allow you to extend your app
by calling a publicly available API, or a custom API you're hosting in a cloud
provider, such as Azure. API stands for Application Programming Interface and
holds a series of functions available for developers. Connectors work by sending
information back and forth across these APIs and gathering available functions
into Power Apps or Power Automate. Because these connectors are function-
based, they call specific functions in the underlying service of the API to return
the corresponding data.
An advantage of building custom connectors is that they can be used in different
platforms, such as Power Apps, Power Automate, and Azure Logic Apps.
You can create custom connectors using three different approaches:
 Using a blank custom connector
 Using an OpenAPI definition
 Using a Postman collection
While the requirements for each approach vary, they all require a Power Apps per
app or per user plan. Each link above points to the instructions for each
approach.

Describe Power Apps

Completed100 XP
 3 minutes
Power Apps is a no-code/low-code platform for building apps that builds off
concepts like formulas in an Excel workbook such as SUM and TEXT. You can use
Power Apps to build simple solutions like vehicle inspection forms and status
reports, or complex business solutions for purchasing processes and inventory
management. If you can envision an app to solve a business problem, then you
can use your existing skills to build it. Although Power Apps can be used by
virtually anyone, it also offers advanced functionality for seasoned developers to
design complex applications with ease.
Work with your data where it lives
When organizations modernize a paper-based process, there are likely systems
with data you can use. With Power Apps, you have choices. With hundreds of
connectors, you can easily connect to data, using the underlying data service
and app platform Microsoft Dataverse or a multitude of online and on-premises
data sources.
Some common data sources include:
 Dataverse
 SharePoint
 Dynamics 365
 SQL Server and Azure SQL
 Office 365
You don't have to choose just one data source. Power Apps easily supports
multiple data connections allowing you to bring data together from many
platforms into a single app.
There are two primary application types that can be created with Power Apps:
canvas and model-driven apps. Each application type has multiple features and
functionality that helps support different scenarios. Let’s look at each one in
more detail.
Explore model-driven applications
Completed100 XP
 6 minutes
Unlike canvas apps where the app maker has control over the data sources,
screen layout, and overall user experience, model-driven apps are always built
from data in Microsoft Dataverse. Model-driven apps use a data first design,
where app design focuses on adding components such as forms, views, charts,
and dashboards to tables using an app designer tool. With model-driven apps,
there's no need to worry about choosing the app size. They're responsive, which
means that they work and display appropriately whether being accessed through
a browser, a mobile phone, or tablet.
Model-driven applications are used as management applications. For example,
when someone reports a problem with audio/visual equipment, they use a
canvas application. To manage the incoming requests, assist users with
troubleshooting, dispatch someone to fix them, and analyze overall operations
related to the organization, organizations typically use a model driven app.
Dashboards and charts let managers see overall performance such as how many
issues are being reported and how they're being resolved. Support users can
easily identify incoming requests and provide support directly from within the
application.
You define the relationships, forms, views, business rules, and more at the data
layer inside of the Dataverse. These definitions give you enough control to
achieve the business result you're looking for without needing to write all the
formulas yourself.
Here's an example of a fundraiser donations tracking model-driven app.
The fundraiser donations dashboard lets managers easily see details related to
incoming donations based on different fundraisers the organization ran. Using
the charts provided, managers can easily examine different donations based on
the donation category, donation totals for each fundraiser, and even compare
the actual donation totals vs the donation goals.
Additionally, they can easily create and manage fundraisers directly from the
application and dive into each individual donation provided.
Model-driven applications provide various different analytic options.
Organizations can easily export data to Microsoft Excel, or they can iusePower BI
integration to create Power BI reports from their business data directly from their
model app.
In the example, a real-estate manager used the Visualize this view button to
generate a property listings report in Power BI that breaks down different its real
estate data in different ways.
Differentiate between canvas apps and model-driven apps
Completed100 XP
 20 minutes
How do you determine which app to use? If your application isn't going to be
connected to a Microsoft Dataverse database, then the choice is easy. You create
a canvas application since model-driven apps can only be built on top of
Dataverse. Otherwise, it's important to first identify what your application is
going to be used for.
The table provides a high-level comparison between the two.
Expand table

App consideration Canvas Model-driven

Data source Not Dataverse-driven Dataverse-driven

App purpose Task or screen focused Back office / process focused

User Interface (UI) Custom UI Responsive / consistent UI

Device integration User personalization

Easily embeddable Data relationship navigation

Security trimming of UI

To expand on this explanation a little more, let’s look at an example. Contoso

Real Estate sells commercial and residential properties. They have a team of
agents in the field that meet with potential sellers and show properties to buyers.
They need to quickly identify which properties to show based on the needs of the
buyer they're working with. When working with a new seller, they also need to
quickly intake the property, snap pictures, schedule open houses, and capture
any other relevant information so the property can be listed as quickly as
possible. Contoso’s managers need to:
 quickly see which properties are currently listed
 know how many times they were shown
 manage offers as they come in
 help provide support to sellers as they work to sell properties
From a seller standpoint, the best solution would be to create a canvas app to
support them in the field. The canvas app can not only connect to Dataverse
data, but it can easily connect to other data sources such as Google Calendar to
schedule open houses for properties. The ability to create a custom user
interface means the application can be designed to provide the best experience
for sellers working in the field. Finally, because of the device integration
capabilities, sellers can easily take pictures of the property using their mobile
device, and those pictures are automatically associated with the property.
The image shows an example of what the seller’s canvas application might look
like.

Sellers are provided with a list of properties they can easily search through to
identify properties to show perspective buyers. Once a property is identified,
they can easily view specifics about the property including pictures. This
capability lets the buyer see the property and decide if it's worth visiting.
Let’s take a closer look at how a canvas app can help listing agents be more
productive while working in the field.
Canvas app
As far as the managers for Contoso Real Estate go, they need to have an
application that lets them manage the big picture and help support sellers. A
model-driven app would best help them support sellers and manage daily
operations. As sellers enter properties using the canvas application, they're
available in the model-driven app. Additionally, they would have easy access to
open houses, showings, and offers that are stored in Microsoft Dataverse. Items
like business rules and business process flows can be used to help guide sellers
through the various processes: listing a home, staging the home, managing open
houses and showings, and negotiating offers.
The image shows an example of what a model driven application might look like.
Under the Property Management group, managers can easily access things like
the real estate properties that are currently for sale. As they open a specific
property, they are presented with basic information such as the property type,
asking price, and the year built. In the Related Details section, we have access
to any open houses, showings, and offers associated with this property. This
provides managers with everything associated with this property from a single
screen without needing to navigate to different areas of the application.
Additionally, a canvas application can be used to help compliment the data in the
model-driven application. In this case, we have an embedded canvas application
on the Real Estate Property form. This app looks at the address, square footage,
number of bedrooms, and asking price of the home being looked at. The app also
lists similar properties in the surrounding area. This information helps managers
do things such as evaluate the asking price of the home vs similar properties in
the area. If needed, they can adjust their asking price as needed.
Let’s see how a model-driven application can help Contoso Real Estate better
support their agents in the field to sell properties faster.
Model-driven app
As you see, when building solutions with Power Apps it's often about identifying
what users are going to need an application to do, and then designing the
applications accordingly. Most often, a solution contains a combination of both
canvas and model-driven apps.
Now that we discussed canvas and model-driven apps and explored scenarios for
each of them, let’s take a deeper look at how to build each of them.

Build a basic canvas app

Completed100 XP
  18 minutes
The basic Power Apps creator journey to build a canvas app looks something like
this:
 Identify a business need that Power Apps can address.
 Connect to any necessary data in your Power Apps.
 Design the app using controls, buttons, and an easy-to-use interface. Then
your end user can interact with the data to accomplish the business need.
 Save and publish the app and test functionality.
 Once satisfied, share the app with end users to give them a better
business process.
To help app creators during their journey, Power Apps has many different
components to build solutions including screens, inputs, galleries, forms, and
more.
Let's review some of the most common elements you need to get started.
Power Apps components
Power Apps Studio
Power Apps Studio is the web interface used to build Power Apps. With Power
Apps, there's no client to download or install for building apps. Everything is
done from the browser by logging into https://make.PowerApps.com. Once in
Power Apps studio, you can create an app from scratch, or use one of the many
different templates available to speed up development of your app.

App format
The first step in creating your app is to choose the format of your app: Mobile or
Tablet. While both formats can be used interchangeably on a mobile device, a
tablet, or a computer, each has different defaults around sizing of the screens
and controls. Once you choose the format for an app, you can't change it.
Connectors
Once you identified the app format you want to use, you need to connect your
app to your data. In Power Apps, this step is done using connectors. There are
over 1,000 prebuilt connectors available.

Galleries
As you build your app, you may encounter scenarios where you need to display a
list of records on a screen. In Power Apps, these displays are done with the
Gallery control. A gallery displays rows from a table of data. A template defines
the display of a row, which you can customize to meet your needs. This process
allows you to control which columns are shown and how they're formatted. Power
Apps then applies this template automatically to every row in your data.

Forms
Unlike Galleries, Forms are focused on working with a specific record, often based
on a selection from a gallery. In this experience, a user browses a gallery to find
and select the desired row to view the details on the form. Forms enable a user
to view detailed information, save new records, and edit existing ones. Form
modes control the various actions performed with forms, allowing the form to
serve many purposes.
Input Controls
To allow you maximum flexibility in customizing your apps, Power Apps has a
large selection of Input controls. Text inputs, buttons, dropdowns, toggles, date
pickers, and sliders are a few examples. You can add these controls to galleries,
forms, and screens to build a functional and aesthetic experience for your app.
All inputs have a multitude of settings for default data, formatting, and actions,
which allow you to build an app that has the right user experience for your
business process.
Intelligent Controls
In addition to common inputs as covered, Power Apps also provides a rich set of
controls for more advanced operations. There are hardware-backed controls,
which allow access to the camera, bar code scanner, GPS, and more hardware
features. There are also service backed controls like the business card reader or
object detector, which allow you to add artificial intelligence to your app without
writing code.
Functions
Functions are the glue that binds all these controls, inputs, and data sources
together. You can use one or more functions to create formulas in your apps.
These formulas are like the language you use in Excel and can be used for
actions such as sending data to a data source, formatting information, creating
animations, and more. No complicated code is necessary. You just use powerful
functions with straightforward inputs to enhance your app.
Responsive containers
When you create a canvas app in Power Apps, you specify whether to tailor the
app for a phone or a tablet. This determines the size and shape of the canvas
provided to build your app. This can create challenges when an app designed for
one from factor runs on another form factor. For example, when an app, which is
designed for a phone runs in a large browser window, the app scales to
compensate and typically looks oversized for its space. The app can't take
advantage of the extra pixels by showing more controls or more content.
To assist with this, Power Apps includes an option for responsive layout
containers. When you use a responsive layout, controls can respond to different
devices or window sizes, making various experiences feel more natural.
Additionally, when you're working with responsive containers, you can also easily
add and reorder controls within and between responsive layout containers. These
controls can be easily positioned using Drag and Drop functionality.
Copilot in Power Apps
As with most Microsoft applications, Copilot is changing the way that work is
being done. This is no different with Power Apps. Copilot is helping to make the
processing, building, and using Power Apps easier.
In Canvas apps, Copilot can be used in two ways:
 App creation: Copilot can assist app makers while designing their Canvas
applications in Power Apps. Makers just need to provide a description of
the app they want to build, and AI designs it for you. You can even use AI
to help you modify various aspects of the application and help with
expression writing.
 Assist users: App makers and add a special Copilot control to the
individual Power Apps they create that can aid users while they work in
the application.
App Creation
The easiest way to use Copilot is through app creation. On the Power Apps home
screen, tell Copilot what kind of information you want to collect, track, or show.
The assistant then generates a Dataverse table and use it to build your canvas
app.

For example, if you were to enter hotel housekeeping, Copilot goes into your
Dataverse environment and creates a new Dataverse table with data that
includes typical hotel housekeeping tasks.
This process is the initial stepping stone for your completed app. At any point,
you can make changes to the app such as modifying the details of the table. You
can even use Copilot to continue to edit your app. By providing instructions, such
as "remove the room type column," Copilot helps you to modify your app.
Click-through demo: Build a canvas app
In this click-through demonstration, you're guided through the process of
creating a marketing segment that can be used with other features such as email
marketing.

Build a basic model-driven app

Completed100 XP
 10 minutes
A model-driven app consists of several components that you select by using the
App Designer. Components and component properties become the metadata.
Let's look more closely at these components.
Model-driven app components
Data
The table shows the different data components that can make up a model-driven
app, which can determine what data the app is based upon.
Expand table

Compone Description
nt

Table Tables are items with properties that you track. Examples include contacts and acc
tables are available. You can customize a nonsystem standard table (or productio
Compone Description
nt

create a custom table from scratch.

Column Columns are properties that are associated with a table and help define that table
by a data type, which determines the type of data that can be entered or select
types include text, number, date and time, currency, and lookup (which create
another table). Columns are typically used in forms, views, and searches.

Relations Relationships define how tables can be related to each other. There are 1:N (one-
hip to-one), and N:N (many-to-many) relationships. For example, adding a lookup colu
a new 1:N relationship between the two tables and lets you add that lookup column

Choice This type of column shows a control that lets the user select among predefined opt
a number value and a label. Choice columns can require either a single value or mu

User interface
The table shows the user interface components, which determine how users
interact with the app and what designer is used to create or edit the component.
Expand table

Compone Description
nt

App Apps determine the app fundamentals, like components, properties, the client type,

Site map A site map specifies the navigation for your app.

Form Forms include a set of data entry columns for a given table. A form can be used to c
or edit an existing one.

View Views define how a list of rows for a specific table appears in your app. A view
shown, the width of each column, the sorting behavior, and the default filters.
Logic
The logic components determine what business processes, rules, and automation
the app has. Microsoft Power Apps makers use a designer that is specific to the
type of process or rule they need.
Expand table

Type of Description
logic

Business Business process flows walk users through a standard business process. Use a bu
process you want everyone to handle customer service requests the same way. Or you
flow process flow to require staff to gain approval for an invoice before submitting an o

Business Business rules apply rules or recommendation logic to a form to set field require
rule fields, validate data, and more. App designers use a simple interface to impleme
changing and commonly used rules.

Flows Power Automate is a cloud-based service that lets you create automated workflo
services to get notifications, sync files, collect data, and more.

Visualization
The visualization components determine what type of data and reporting the app
shows and which designer is used to create or edit that component.
Expand table

Component Description

Chart Charts are individual graphical visualizations that can appear in a view
be added to a dashboard.

Dashboard Dashboards show one or more graphical visualizations in one place tha
of actionable business data.

Embedded Power BI adds embedded Power BI tiles and dashboards to your app.
Microsoft Power BI based service that provides business intelligence (BI) insight.

Some examples of visualizations in a model-driven app:

Building model-driven apps
Model-driven apps are built using the App designer. It’s a simplified user
interface that allows you to specify which tables the app is based on and which
visual elements should be included. Let’s look at the App Designer for one of the
available sample model-driven apps called "Fundraiser."
This application includes two Dataverse tables: Donation and Fundraiser.

Once you define the tables for your app, you need to define the visual elements
that are used to present the data to users. For each table, you need to specify
the following information:
 Forms – Defines how users see and interact with individual records.
  Views – Defines how lists of rows are presented for each table. For
example, you might create a view to display a list of all active fundraisers.
You can specify which specific forms or views to include for a table by selecting
either the table form or view and choosing either Manage forms or Manage
Views.
For example, the Account table in Dataverse includes all the columns defined for
it. However, the data might not be relevant for each of your model driven
applications. Let’s say that an organization created two model driven
applications: Fundraiser and Innovation. In the fundraiser application, you would
likely need details related to fundraising efforts such as an account’s tax
exemption status. However, it’s likely that in the innovation application, you
wouldn't need that need that data. As a result, you would typically have two
different account forms. One for the fundraising app with the tax exemption
status details, and another for the innovation app without those fields.

It's possible to include multiple forms and views per table. In the screenshot,
we're including multiple views to help manage donations. Only the selected
forms are displayed. However, if you don't select any view or forms, the system
assumes that all items should be included in your app.
Add new content to an application
New content is added to the application by selecting the Add page button. When
you add a new page, you specify which type of page you want to use.
There are several options to choose from:
 Table-based form and view: Allows you to display records of table in a
full-page list view. Forms associated with that table are also included.
 Dashboard: Allows you to displays charts and tables from multiple
entities to visualize data on a single page. Multiple dashboards can be
added to a model application.
 URL: Allows you to add a URL to the application navigation.
 Web resource: Allows you to display a web resource inside a page. Web
resources are files created by developers that extend the functionality of
an app.
 Custom: Allows you to design and build the type of page you want by
dragging interactive components into the canvas.
Testing the application
By selecting the Play button on the top right, the app is put into Play mode. You
can see the app that displays data based on the choices made in the design
process.

Throughout this unit, we talked about how individuals can create model-driven
applications in Power Apps. Many times, application building isn't being done by
just one individual. Power Apps coauthoring feature allows makers to edit model-
driven applications together in real time. The ability to coauthor can dramatically
reduce the amount of time it takes organizations to build applications.
Power Automate is used to automate repetitive business processes. Beyond
simple workflows, Power Automate can send reminders on past due tasks, move
business data between systems on a schedule, talk to more than 1,000 data
sources or any publicly available API, and can even automate tasks on your local
computer like computing data in Excel. All of this can is done by individuals at all
skill levels, from typical business users to IT using Power Platform.
Imagine you work for a company called Komatsu Australia, a subsidiary of
Komatsu, an industry-leading manufacturer of construction, forestry, and mining
equipment. Komatsu wants to improve the operational efficiency of their
invoicing process. They decide to partner with Microsoft and use Power Automate
to address their current manual and inefficient process. With Power Automate
and AI Builder. Their pilot project is so successful that Komatsu Australia
launches a citizen developer program to design new tools and develop solutions.
The goal of this module is to equip you with the knowledge and skills to
effectively use Power Automate to automate your business processes and
improve efficiency. By the end of this module, you should be able to describe the
capabilities and business value of Power Automate.
Describe the capabilities of Power Automate
Completed100 XP
 18 minutes
Do you find yourself regularly downloading email attachments and then
uploading the file to the database? Every business in every industry has
repetitive tasks that impact their organization. The process of getting a new
purchase order approved might involve taking a form from your desk to get it
approved. An employee might need to log into a website every morning to find
daily numbers and then save those numbers into another system. Not only can
repetitive processes like these be time consuming, but they can also be prone to
errors. If someone mis-enters something, it could result in a missed deadline or a
financial loss.
Microsoft Power Automate is about having computers manage repetitive tasks. It
gives anyone with the knowledge of the business process to create a repeatable
flow that when triggered, leaps into action and performs the process.
Common scenarios and capabilities of Power Automate:
 Automating repetitive tasks such as moving data from one system to
another.
 Guiding a user through a process so they can complete the different
stages. For example, a sales organization might want to guide sellers
through the process of selling products to customers.
 Automating desktop based and website processes with Robotic Process
Automation (RPA) capabilities. For example, a user working at a bank
needs to update the exchange rates daily. The user would use RPA to log
in to the website and retrieve the exchange rates. They would then save
these rates to their desktop and update them in a company spreadsheet.
Power Automate works by creating flows. These flows are then used to do things
such as interact with different systems, guide users through a process, or make
users more productive by automating daily tasks.
Types of flows
There are three primary types of Power Automate flows:
 Business process flows: These flows are used in model-driven apps to
help people get work done. They provide a streamlined user experience
that leads people through the processes their organization defined for
interactions that need to be advanced to a conclusion of some kind.
 Cloud flows: These are the most commonly used flows. Cloud flows begin
with a trigger such as receiving an email from a specific person, or a
mention of your company in social media. Once triggered, they also
generally include one or more actions such as creating a record in a
different system or sending an approval request to someone.
 Desktop flows - These robotic process automation (RPA) flows allow you
to record yourself performing actions on your desktop or within a web
browser. You can then trigger a flow to perform that process for you. You
can also pass data in or get data out of the process, letting you automate
even "manual" business processes.
Business process flows
Business process flows are mostly used in model-driven applications to help
users get work done. They typically represent a process that a user follows
through to completion. They provide a streamlined user experience to provide
them with the best way to advance to a conclusion of some kind.
Some common scenarios where organizations might use business process flows
are:
 Sales Process: Organizations can create sales focused business process
flows that guide sellers through the entire sales process ensuring that they
are following the organization proven sales procedures for maximizing
their chance of winning the deal.
 Case Resolution: Support centers might create service centered
business process flows that guide agents through the process of creating a
case, troubleshooting the case, and ultimately resolving the case.
 Event Planning: An event planning company might use a business
process flows to ensure that they are not missing a step when they are
planning an event. Stages in the process can exist for booking the venue,
planning the meal, defining entertainment details and more.
 Selling a home: A real estate company might use a business process
flow to assist their agents in getting a home ready for an open house. This
might include having stages for capturing inspection details, staging the
property, and coordinating with staff to ensure someone is available at the
time.
In the image, we see an example of a business process flow used to help guide
an agent through the process of fielding an offer from a potential buyer.

During each stage, there's information that needs to be logged. Based on the
information captured, the stages of the business process flow might change. For
example, since the Counter Offer field is set to yes, the counter offer stage
appears. If the Counter Offer field was set to no, the stage wouldn't appear.
Cloud flows
As stated, cloud flows are the most common Power Automate flows. Cloud flows
use connectors to interact with different services. Currently there are over 1,000
prebuilt connectors available. These connectors allow you to interact with data
from other Microsoft products and data from non-Microsoft vendors such as
Google, Salesforce, Oracle, and more.
There are three main types of cloud flows that you can create:
  Automated flows: These flows are automatically triggered by an event.
This might be the arrival of an email from a specific person, or a mention
of your company in social media. These are the most used cloud flow.
 Instant flows: These flows are started automatically and are done with
the click of a button. You can automate for repetitive tasks from your
Desktop or Mobile devices. For example, you might use an instant flow to
instantly send a reminder to the team with the push of a button from your
mobile device.
 Scheduled: These flows run on a defined schedule. They might be used
to fire off daily data uploads to Microsoft SharePoint or a database.
Now that we explored the types of cloud flows you can create, let’s explore some
common scenarios where organizations might use cloud flows.
 Approvals: They can be used to automate approval processes such as
invoice approval, time off requests, project approval, and more.
 Application integration: They can be used to allow an application to
interact with another application. For example, a technician in the field
might use a dedicated app to request a part. A Power Automate flow could
automatically order the part in the company’s inventory system.
 Improve productivity: End users might create personal Power Automate
flows to automatically do things such as saving attachments received via
email to specific locations like SharePoint or OneDrive.
More advanced examples of organizations utilizing Power Automate flows might
include:
 Interfacing with a custom Application Programming Interface (API) built by
a financial services company to automatically retrieve the most recent
loan rates, and then calculate the rate of an individual based on their
credit score.
 Create a smart data filing system whereas documents are received, and
the content in them are scanned. Based on the type of document it is
automatically filed in a specific location and could even be flagged as
needed.
Since there are hundreds of templates available to support different scenarios,
cloud flows are easily created by anyone.
Desktop flows
Desktop flows are used to simulate user interaction with an application or a
website. Desktop flows are often referred to as RPA. Think of it as a computer
playing back tasks and steps that are otherwise done by an individual. In Power
Automate, these types of flows are built using Power Automate for desktop.
Desktop flows are different than cloud flows. A cloud flow performs an action
based on API calls, whereas a desktop flow is like a macro as it's playing back
previously recorded steps in order.
Some of the common scenarios where an organization might use desktop flows
are:
  Improve employee productivity: A desktop flow can be created to
replicate the actions of an end user who performs repetitive tasks. An
example would be interacting with a specific website such as an interest
rate site, and then entering that information into another application like
an Excel Spreadsheet.
 Interacting with a legacy system: Many organizations are still using
home built legacy applications that don't have modern APIs available that
could be used by a cloud flow. In these instances, you can still automate
the interaction with the legacy application without needing to rebuild the
application from the ground up.
 Automating website interaction: Many users need to interact with
specific websites daily to enter details or capture information. For security
reasons, many companies don't provide access to their APIs to allow you
to do direct automation with their platform. A Desktop flow is a great way
to mimic the user interaction and provide an automated solution.
 Automate working with terminal emulation software: Many
organizations use terminal emulation software such as Citrix to reduce
hardware cost. Users log into simulated desktops. Many of these users
perform repetitive tasks. Desktop flows can be used to mimic user
keystrokes and automate activity.
There are just some of the many different examples where an organization could
use desktop flows. Let’s look at another example. In this example, a real estate
company uses a website to see if new properties have any environmental items
attached to the property. If any are found, they take a screenshot of the report
and log it into Excel. In this video, we show you how a desktop flow could
automate this process after a new property is entered into their property
management model-driven application.
Desktop flow
Business scenario
Often, a desktop flow is part of a bigger overall automation solution. For
example, an event management company provides different package tiers to
their clients to help them with cost savings on their event. This means that
clients don't need to pay separately for each service. The event management
company pays the vendors on behalf of the client. For example, when they plan a
wedding, they book the venue, hire the caterer, book the entertainment, and
even sometimes hire a florist. When the event is complete, each vendor sends
them an invoice for the services they provided.
That process is as follows:
 Vendor invoices are received as email attachments in a dedicated email
box.
 Invoice attachments are downloaded from the email and scanned to
determine what the invoice is for. Details such as the vendor, invoice date,
and invoice amount are extracted from the attachment.
  Invoices are sent to a specific person to be evaluated and either approved
or denied, based on the services provided.
 Individuals receive and interact with this request in Teams.
 Invoice is approved and a new invoice is created in the event management
companies legacy invoice application.
 Invoice number is generated once the invoice has been entered. A
confirmation email that the invoice was processed is sent back to the
vendor. This includes the invoice number.
The image shows a high-level breakdown of what this automation would look like
in a Power Automate flow.

The whole process is done with a cloud flow.

1. The cloud flow is triggered automatically when an email is received in the
dedicated mailbox in Outlook.
2. AI Builder is used to extract details from the invoice attachment such as
the vendor, invoice date, and amount.
3. An approval request is sent to the appropriate person in Microsoft Teams.
The request includes the invoice details extracted from it.
4. Once the approval request is complete, a condition evaluates if the invoice
was approved or rejected.
5. Based on the approval status:
 Approved: If approved, the cloud flow runs a desktop flow that was
created to interact with the legacy application. The invoice details
such as the vendor, invoice date, and amount are used in the
creation of the invoice record.
 o Once the invoice is logged, the invoice number is captured,
and a new email is created in Outlook. The email includes the
status of the invoice and the invoice number.
 Rejected: if the invoice is rejected, the cloud flow creates a new
email in Outlook, letting the vendor know their invoice wasn't
approved.
xplore the different Power Automate apps
Completed100 XP
 6 minutes
There are three different Power Automate applications that makers can use to
create and manage the different types of flows available. These applications
ensure that Power Automate flow creators can create the flows and automations
that they need.
The primary applications are:
 Power Automate Portal: The maker portal provides a single access
point for makers where they can easily create, manage, and monitor the
different Power Automate flows they created.
 Power Automate Mobile: Power Automate Mobile provides access to
Power Automate functionality while on the go. The mobile app is available
and optimized for both Android and iOS devices.
 Power Automate for Desktop: Power Automate Desktop is used to
create robotic process automation flows.
Power Automate Portal
The easiest place to begin designing Power Automate flows is the Power
Automate maker portal. The maker portal provides you with access to all the
different elements that you can use with Power Automate. The image shows
what the Power Automate maker portal looks like.
When you first access the maker portal, the left navigation is broken down into
three sections:
1. The first section is related to creating and managing your Power Automate
flows. It includes the following screens:
 Home: The main home screen for the maker portal. This screen
provides you with quick access to many of the different Power
Automate components in your tenant.
 Create: This screen is where you can create new Power Automate
flows.
 Learn: The Learn screen provides access to multiple resources that
you can use to help improve your Power Automate skills.
 My flows: The My flows screen provides access to all the Power
Automate flows that you created.
2. The second section provides access to different Power Automate elements
that you can use with Power Automate such as AI Builder, Process Advisor,
Connections, and more. Items that would be available in this section
include:
 Approvals: Provides access to any approvals that you sent or
received.
 Connectors: Used to connect to different sources that you want
involved in the Automation you're creating.
 Data: Provides access to the data that's supporting your flows such
as Dataverse tables, gateways, and customer connectors.
 Monitor: Provides analytics around the different flows.
  AI Builders: Provides access to AI Builder tools that can be used as
part of a Power Automate solution.
 Process Advisor: Provides tools that organizations can use to
analyze organizational process to identify scenarios where
automation could be used to support an organization.
 Solutions: Provides access to the different solutions that are
deployed to your environment.
The items in this section can be pinned and unpinned to the navigation to ensure
that only the elements that you want to display are shown.
3. The final section provides easy access to other Power Platform sites that
can be useful. The items available here include:
 Power Platform admin center
 Power Apps maker portal
 Power Pages maker portal
 Power BI
Power Automate mobile
There are many different scenarios where individuals may need access to Power
Automate from their mobile device. For example, a manager may need to
approve a change order that was submitted for an upcoming project. Until
approved, the project remains in a holding pattern, which could eat into the
company’s profits.
The Power Automate mobile application is available for both Android and IOS
devices. It provides users with the familiar look and feel of Power Automate while
they are on the go.
With the Power Automate mobile application, you can:
 Run instant flows: Any instant flow that you created is available here.
Selecting the flow runs it.
 Manage activities: Provides easy access to any items that require your
approval and any notifications.
 Create new flows: New cloud flows can be created directly from within
the application.
 Manage Existing flows: Easily monitor and make changes to any cloud
flows that you have created.
Power Automate for Desktop
Power Automate for Desktop flows broaden the existing capabilities in Power
Automate and enable you to automate all repetitive desktop processes. The
Power Automate desktop flow designer contains prebuilt drag-and-drop actions
that can be easily inserted into a flow.

Desktop flows are addressed to essentially everyone who is performing simple or

complex rule-based tasks on their workstations. Users at home, small
businesses, enterprises, or larger companies can use automation capabilities in
Power Automate to create flows. These flows interact with everyday tools like
email and Excel, or work with modern and legacy applications.
Examples of simple and complex tasks you can automate are:
 Quickly organize your documents using dedicated files and folders actions
 Accurately extract data from websites and store them in Excel files using
web and Excel automation
 Apply desktop automation capabilities to put your work on autopilot
Power Automate covers many use cases. These use cases include the home user
who is accessing a weather website to see tomorrow's forecast, the self-
employed businessperson extracting information from vendors' invoices, or even
an employee of a large enterprise who automates data entry on an ERP system.
It allows you to automate legacy applications, such as terminal emulators,
modern web and desktop applications, Excel files, and folders. You can interact
with the machine using application UI elements, images, or coordinates.
Describe the components of a cloud flow
Completed100 XP
 5 minutes
As you begin to create Power Automate flows, it’s important to note that every
cloud flow has two main parts.
 Trigger: Determine what starts the flow
  Actions: Determine what the flow does
Triggers
Triggers are the starting action for a flow. A trigger could be something such as a
new email arriving in your inbox or a new item being added to a SharePoint list. A
flow only has one trigger.
While a flow only has one trigger, there are a few different types of triggers that
can be used:
 When something changes: This type of trigger runs when data is
changed. It could be a new item created in SharePoint, when a lead is
updated in Dynamics, or when an event has been deleted from Outlook for
example. When something changes triggers are the most used triggers.
 On a schedule: You can set up a flow to be triggered at a certain time of
day and with a recurrence. This scheduling allows for processes such as
checking every day at 8 AM to see if there are account renewals pending
and if so, sending an email to the necessary people.
 On a button press: This trigger takes shape in many ways. It can be
when a flow virtual button is run via the mobile app and a physical button
is clicked with third party options. Alternatively, it can be when a button is
pressed inside of Power Apps. This capability gives you and/or the users
control to "run" a flow on demand.
Actions
Actions are what you want to happen when a trigger is invoked. For example, the
new email trigger starts the action of creating a new file on OneDrive. A typical
Power Automate flow has multiple actions.
Now that we introduced you to triggers and actions, let’s examine how they're
used together when you create a flow. In this example, we examine purchase
order approval. Approvals are often processes that are done manually but could
easily be done with a Power Automate flow.
An organization can easily create a purchase request app using Microsoft Power
Apps. Users who need to purchase something would initiate the purchase order
process by going into the Purchase Order Power App creating a purchase order
(PO) request. In those instances, the trigger would be the user selecting a submit
button on the power app. Once the request is submitted, the information is sent
to a Power Automate flow.
It is at this step that the actions come in. The flow's first action is to identify the
manager of the user who initiated the PO request. In this case, the flow is using a
Microsoft 365 connector to retrieve the user’s manager automatically from Azure
AD. Next it creates an approval request in Microsoft Teams. The approval request
is assigned to the manager who was identified in the Get manager action.
The image shows an example of the starting point of the flow:
Often, organizations have different procedures to support different types of
scenarios. For example, a company might have a policy where purchase requests
for more than $10,000.00 need to be sent to a Vice President before they can be
completed. This logic can be easily built into a flow using conditions. In this case,
after the manager receives the approval request and approves it, the flow
includes a condition to see if the value of the request is for more
than $10,000.00. If it is, there's another action to send an approval to the VP in
Microsoft Teams. If the item is less than $10,000.00, then the item is officially
approved and the request is submitted.
The image provides a high-level example of what that flow may look like.
Even though this flow has many decision points, each of the decisions is handled
without needing to write any code. Once the flow is activated, it handles
purchase order requests automatically. The approval process becomes part of
your users’ daily activities.
Work with your data where it lives
When you build or create any type of automation, access to your data is
important. Without correct access to the data, the automation may not be able to
execute appropriately. Power Automate makes connecting to your data easy with
over 1000 connectors that you can use to easily connect to data and services
across the web and on-premises.
Some common data sources include:
 Microsoft Dataverse
 Salesforce
 Dynamics 365
  Google Drive
 Office 365
 Oracle
As you see from the previous example, you don't have to choose just one data
source. Microsoft Power Platform easily supports multiple data connections
allowing you to bring data together from many platforms into a single
automation.
Now that we see how a Power Automate flow works, let’s examine some different
scenarios where organizations might use Power Automate flows with other
services.

Consider Power Automate scenarios

Completed100 XP
 11 minutes
Most organizations utilize multiple applications and services every day. Users are
sending and receiving emails in one application, while salespeople and service
reps might be working in the organization’s Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) system. Having so many different applications, it's common to have
processes or procedures that need to pass information across these applications.
One of the advantages of Power Automate is how easily it works with the
different applications that organizations use each day. This is true even when the
applications aren't built from the same vendor. For example, using connectors,
you can easily trigger a flow when an order is created in Salesforce and store a
copy of it in SharePoint. Regardless of which services and applications an
organization is using, there are many times when a flow interacts with many of
the most popular Microsoft technologies. A flow can be triggered when someone
creates a new document in Microsoft SharePoint or sends an approvals card to a
manager in Microsoft Teams. Power Automate can easily be used to create
processes around interact with those applications.
Let’s examine some use-cases related to popular Microsoft technologies.
Use flows with approvals
We mentioned approvals a few times throughout this module. Whether you need
written acknowledgment from a manager or a formal authorization from a
diverse group of stakeholders, getting things approved is part of almost every
organization.
With the approvals capability in Power Automate, you can automate approval
requests and combine human decision making into workflows. When you submit
an approval in a flow, approvers are notified and can review and act on the
request.
Some popular cases where approvals can be used include:
  Approving vacation time requests: Employees can submit a vacation
request via a dedicated application, or by filling out a vacation request
form. The request is sent to a manager who can approve or deny the
request.
 Approving documents that need sign off: Documents that require
approval or signing off can be easily sent to the appropriate person to be
signed off on. Once approved, a confirmation or copy of the signed
document could be sent to all parties to confirm it was completed.
 Approving expense reports: After an employee fills out an expense
report, a Power Automate flow can identify the person’s manager, and
send them the report for their approval.
For more information about using approvals in Power Automate, see: Get started
with approvals.
Power Automate and Microsoft SharePoint
Microsoft SharePoint is a popular application that allows organizations to create
sites where users can share documents and information with colleagues,
partners, and customers. With the document management capabilities of
SharePoint, users can easily track different versions of documents, and
collaborate with others. With SharePoint being used to support so many different
scenarios, it makes sense that organizations would want to be able to automate
many of the different elements.
Let’s look at some different examples of how you can use Power Automate with
SharePoint:
Managing approval flows
There are multiple ways that Power Automate could be used to support approval
processes in SharePoint. For example, documents that contain sensitive
information such as personal details, financial details, or strategies often require
approval. With the content approval feature in SharePoint, you can put an
approval process for documents in a specific document library. Any documents
pending approval aren't visible to users until they're approved. This approach
prevents documents that don't meet organizational standards accidentally being
used which could result in financial losses.
Another example is related to SharePoint sites. Organizations often create
SharePoint team sites that connect team members with shared content and
resources. When users create pages on a site, organizations can start an
approval process to ensure the content aligns with organizational standards.
SharePoint can be easily configured to require that changes to a site be approved
before they go live.
Working with files and lists
There are many scenarios where Power Automate flows can be used with
SharePoint files and lists. One example is using Power Automate flows to help
manage permissions of an individual item in a list or a file that is stored in a
document library. For example, a flow could be used to grant access or provide
approval for when an item is created or added to a specific folder. When an item
is created, an approval request is created. Once the request is received, the flow
sends the request to a manager who could approve the request.

Additionally, Power Automate flows could be used to create SharePoint items

based on actions occurring in other applications, such as an invoice being
created in an Enterprise Resource Planning application. For example, one an
invoice is created, the Power Automate flow could save the invoice as a PDF, and
then save the file to a dedicated customer folder in a SharePoint document
library.
For more information about using SharePoint and Power Automate together,
see: Use SharePoint and Power Automate to build workflows.
Using Power Automate with Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is the most widely used email application in businesses. Users
not only use it for sending and receiving email, but they also use it for managing
their individual contacts and managing their daily activities. This provides many
different opportunities where Power Automate could potentially be used to
automate Outlook scenarios. For example, a real estate agent might create and
store customer contracts in popular document services such as Dropbox,
OneDrive, or SharePoint. Once a customer contract is created, a Power Automate
flow could automatically create an email to the customer and attach the newly
created contracts as attachments. Additionally, once the customer sends back
the signed contract, another flow could save the signed contracts back to the
document repository. This helps the real estate agent ensure that contracts are
being sent out and cataloged in a timely manner, and there are no manual steps
the agent needs to take.

In most organizations, two popular connectors are used for email flows regularly:
the Outlook.com for personal email scenarios and the Office 365
Outlook connector for business scenarios. Both connectors offer similar
operations that you can use to manage your mail, calendars, and contacts. You
can perform actions such as send mail, schedule meetings, add contacts, and
more with either of these connectors.
For more information about using Outlook and Power Automate together,
see: Using Outlook and Power Automate
Using flows with Microsoft Forms
Microsoft Forms is an online tool for creating surveys and polls. It’s useful for
gathering customer feedback, assessing employee satisfaction, and organizing
team events. There are many instances where forms or polls created with
Microsoft Forms could benefit from automation. For example, schools frequently
use Microsoft Forms for student quizzes. A teacher could use a flow that notifies
them when a student turns in a quiz. A real-estate organization might use
Microsoft Forms for new clients to provide details about themselves and the
types of properties they're interested in. With a Power Automate flow, after a
potential client completes the form, an email notification could be sent to an
agent in their area. This ensures that the agent reaching out to the customer is
local and ensures that the agent can engage with the customer as soon as
possible.
Various templates are available to help flow creators build flows for different
Microsoft Forms scenarios. These include initiating an approval process based on
form submissions or tracking Microsoft Forms responses in Microsoft Excel.
In the image, we filtered the list to only display templates that work with
Microsoft Forms. We were able to take it one step further and search for
templates that work with Outlook. The list of templates shows only templates
that include Microsoft Forms and Outlook.

For more information about using Microsoft Forms and Power Automate together,
see: Overview of flows with Microsoft Forms
Using flows with Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a robust messaging and collaboration tool used globally by
organizations. It provides employees with a workspace for real-time
collaboration, meetings, and sharing files and applications.
Power Automate flows can be used in three scenarios with Teams:
 Trigger flows from Teams messages: In this scenario, you can create flows
that are triggered when someone selects a Teams message. The flow can
then run like any other flow you create. For more information, see: Flows
from Teams messages.
 Use flows with adaptive cards: Here, adaptive cards can be used as the
trigger for flows. A full set of rich adaptive cards is available to you. For
more information, see: Adaptive cards.
 Create flows from within the Power Apps app in Teams: Use the Power
Apps app in Teams to create flows that use Dataverse for Teams.
Dataverse for Teams is a built-in, low-code data platform for Teams that
empowers users to build custom apps and workflows within Teams by
using Power Apps and Power Automate. For more information, see: Power
Apps in Teams, and Dataverse for Teams.
Describe process mining
Completed100 XP
 7 minutes
As organizations start to look at how to best use automation to streamline their
business, a key step is process mining. Process mining helps organizations gain a
better understanding of their real processes, how they're operated, and identify
opportunities for improvement, automation, and digitization.
Process mining in Power Automate works with the existing Microsoft platform and
ecosystem to provide end-to-end solutions and enable faster business decisions.
It helps extract event data from your system of records and visualizes your
different processes to allow you to customize your process mining reports,
compare processes, determine the root cause of inefficiencies, and monitor KPIs.
Overall, the process mining capability is a valuable tool for businesses seeking to
improve their operational efficiency and make informed decisions.

Process mining helps organizations to:

 Improve operational efficiency: Process mining can help identify
bottlenecks and inefficiencies in processes, allowing organizations to
streamline their operations and improve productivity.
 Enhance customer experience: By identifying process pain points and
eliminating them, organizations can improve the customer experience and
increase satisfaction.
 Optimize resources: Process mining enables businesses to identify
opportunities for automation, reducing the need for manual intervention
and allowing resources to be allocated more effectively.
 Ensure compliance: Process mining can help organizations to identify
noncompliant processes and take corrective action to avoid legal and
financial risks.
 Improve supply chain management processes: Create processes that
help warehouse and operations managers gain insights into the material
flow in the warehouse. This can help improve the performance of the
warehouse.
Power Automate provides multiple templates to help get you started analyzing
processes. Those templates are:
 Azure templates: Multiple Azure templates provide easy to use
templates to analyze multiple operations that are done with Azure. These
Azure templates include:
o Azure DevOps (work tracking) template

o Azure DevOps (pipelines) template

o Logic Apps (standard plan) template

o Logic Apps (consumption plan) template

o Durable Functions template

 Finance and operations templates: Multiple templates for Finance and

Operations include:
o Accounts payable template

o Procure to pay

o Visualizations and KPIs

  Power Platform templates: The Power Platform templates make it easy
to analyze your organizations Desktop flows, and Power Apps
Build a basic Power Automate cloud flow
Completed
100 XP
9 minutes
Now that we reviewed the primary elements of Power Automate, let’s take a
high-level look at how to create a basic Power Automate cloud flow.

It can be time-consuming to search for attachments through email at Contoso

Manufacturing. To alleviate those time-consuming searches, you can build a flow
that stores email attachments in different folders on your Microsoft OneDrive
account. Thankfully, there's a template to help you get started.

Cloud flows can quickly be created from the Power Automate maker portal. You
can either select the + Create button on the screen or select + Create from the
left navigation.

Screenshot of Power Automate maker portal with the + Create button

highlighted.

The next thing you must decide is whether you apply one of the many different
templates available to create your flow or build your own from scratch. As you
become more advanced, you might want to build your own, but when you are
first starting, the easiest way is to start with a template.

Screenshot of Power Automate maker portal screen after having selected the +
Create button.

Initially you see a series of predefined filters that you can select from. These are
populated based on your past activities. You can select one of the predefined
filters, or you can search by a specific word or phrase like "Outlook." When you
select a specific template, you see details about the template, including the data
sources it connects to.

Screenshot of Power Automate maker portal with available templates after

having selected Outlook as the data source.
Once the initial flow is created, you need to enter details to ensure the flow
operates as intended. For example, if you want to store email attachments in
different OneDrive folders based on sender, you need to configure the condition
accordingly. In the image, we see that any attachments are saved to a OneDrive
folder called Power Apps.

Screenshot of building an Outlook-based flow.

For the flow we just discussed, the folder where we want to save the
attachments is the only piece of data we need to provide. Everything is done
with a point-and-click interface. As you become more familiar with Power
Automate, you may decide that you want to create your flows from scratch to
support more advanced scenarios.

Since not everyone is going to be comfortable writing expressions, designers can

show Power Automate an example of a value that you want to format and the
desired output, and Power Automate suggests the appropriate expression to use.
With this feature, you can easily format dates, numbers, and texts.

Screenshot of Power Automate suggesting expressions for desired output.

Once your flow is created, you can save it by selecting the Save button.

Now that we walked you through the steps of a building a flow, let’s see the
process in action. In the following simulation, we create a simple flow from a
template that saves email attachments to a specific OneDrive folder based on
email sender.

Build a cloud flow with Copilot

Completed100 XP
 8 minutes
Often, you may not know exactly which connector to use, or which operations
are available for a specific connector. You have a general idea of what you want
your flow to do but aren't 100% sure how to do it. To help you with this situation,
you can use Copilot. Copilot allows you to merely describe what you want your
flow to do, and Copilot creates the flow for you. Once Copilot provides you with
its suggestion, you can continue to use it to refine the specifics of the flow until
you have exactly what you're looking for.
The cloud flows Copilot can perform the following actions:
  Understand your intent, and create a flow based on the scenario prompt
you provide.
 Autoset up connections on your behalf to get you to a working automation
as soon as possible.
 Apply the necessary parameters in the flow based on your prompt.
 Respond to your requests to amend your flow, such as update actions and
replace actions.
 Answer questions about your flow and product. For example, you can ask
Copilot questions about your flow like: What does my flow do? You can also
ask Copilot product questions such as: How do I access child flows? How
do I access licenses?
To start building, describe what you want the flow to do. For example, type in:
Every month, on the real estate SharePoint site, move all files located in the New
- Invoices Document library to the Archived - Invoices document library. It’s
important that you're as descriptive as possible when identifying what you want
the flow to do. The more descriptive you are, the more likely Copilot is to
correctly identify what you want to do.

Copilot identifies which trigger to use, and which connectors should be used in
the flow and include them. It also provides a suggested structure for the flow.
Don’t worry if it doesn't create exactly what you are looking for. You can either
modify the text you supplied in your description to have it provide a different
suggestion, or you modify the individual steps later either manually or with
Copilot.
Once you feel as though you have the initial structure of the flow you want, you
can have Copilot create the flow. As mentioned previously, once created, you can
make specific edits as needed. You may want to modify the SharePoint site
address to the specific one you want to use.

Build a Desktop flow

Completed100 XP
 12 minutes
While cloud flows are executed in the cloud using connectors to attach to APIs,
desktop flows run on a local machine. Power Automate for Desktop is an
application installed on your computer and it records Power Automate desktop
flows running directly on the machine. Once created, desktop flows can be
triggered manually or by cloud flows. For example, a desktop flow that
automates a user’s interaction with an excel spreadsheet might be triggered
manually. A desktop flow that creates an invoice is typically triggered
automatically, since invoice details would likely come for somewhere else.
Let’s take a high-level look at the process for creating a desktop flow automation.
Desktop flows are created using the Power Automate for Desktop application.
This is an application that is installed on the computer where the desktop flow is
performing the operation.
Like cloud flows, there are multiple desktop flow templates that you can use to
help get started building desktop flows. These templates are available in
the Examples section. Examples are broken down into common scenarios.
In the image, you see a screenshot of the Desktop Automation examples.
Examples range from beginner to advanced.
Now you are ready to work with one of the examples, such as the flow that opens
a file. You want to copy the original to ensure you don’t modify the original.
Creating desktop flows in done in the Power Automate Desktop designer.

The designer is laid out as follows:

1. Toolbar: Contains basic operations for use with actions, such asSave,
Undo, Copy, Debug and Paste. Also contains buttons to start the UI/Web
recorders and to control the process execution, such as Start, Pause and
Stop.
2. Sub flows: Allows you to create sub flows under your main flow.
 3. Actions pane: Contains all Power Automate Desktop Actions and includes
a search bar that helps find specific actions by matching the action name
to the text string.
4. Workspace: Contains all the actions added to the process so far.
Functions are separated into tabs.
5. Input/output variables: Contains all the variables you created in the
process.
6. Flow variables: List variables created by the process.
This flow assists a user in opening files. It opens a file dialog box where the user
can select a specific file to open. Once you select the file, it opens. It’s a basic
example but it does help to illustrate desktop flow concepts well.
You can add more actions by expanding an action category, selecting the action
you want and then dragging the action into the workspace. In the image, we
have expanded the Excel group to display a list of Excel actions. If we want a
flow to open a specific excel spread sheet, we select the Launch Excel action.

Another way to add actions is to use the recorder. The recorder lets you record
the steps that you execute inside websites, on the desktop, or inside
applications. As you perform actions such as opening an application and filling
out data, the recorder keeps track of the steps you performed. Once you can
complete the operation you want, those steps stored and saved. The steps can
then be easily edited inside the designer.
As you're building a desktop flow, you want to test it to ensure that it's
performing as intended. You can test your flow at any time by selecting
the Run button. The recorded steps are played back in the order they were
defined in the flow. In the image, the flow is displaying an open file dialog where
the user can select the file to open.

Once created, this desktop flow can be run manually by an individual user by
selecting it in their Power Automate for Desktop app, or automatically triggered
by a cloud flow. In the image, you can see an example of manually running a
desktop flow from the Power Automate for Desktop application.
Now that we've walked through the high-level steps to create a desktop flow,
let’s demonstrate the process. In the following click-through demonstration, we
create a desktop flow that opens an invoice application and creates a new invoic
Describe the business value of Power Automate
Completed100 XP
 3 minutes
You now have an overview of Power Automate and how it drives business value.
Now let's explore how Komatsu is using Power Automate to drive operational
efficiency.
Komatsu Australia is the Australian subsidiary of Komatsu, an industry-leading
manufacturer of construction, forestry, and mining equipment. When the parts
department at Komatsu Australia struggled to manually process nearly 52,000
invoices annually, it used Power Automate and AI Builder to automate its invoice
processing workflow.
As part of its normal business operation, Komatsu Australia source their parts
from over 250 global OEMs and local suppliers and receives hundreds of invoices
per day. The invoices are usually sent as PDFs to a shared Microsoft Outlook
inbox monitored by the parts department, which consists of three people.
Receiving over 1,100 invoices from a single supplier alone left the small parts
department scrambling to stay on top of the invoice influx, as well as perform
the manual process of entering the invoices into its system.
The new invoicing process uses two types of automated “flows” within Power
Automate: cloud flows and desktop flows. See the graphic for the new automated
process:
The solution was developed in just three weeks, saving over 300 labor-intensive
manual entry hours for a single supplier alone. Because of this success, Komatsu
Australia also launched their own citizen developer program, to inspire and
empower employees to build their own business solutions. The program, which
has begun with its first cohort since the pilot, is helping divisions and
departments across Komatsu to innovate quickly and to streamline processes
and improve efficiency through automation and digitization.
To read more about the solution built by Komatsu and the impact its citizen
developer program is having, see the full case study here.
Now you have an overview of Power Automate and how Komatsu uses this
powerful service. The demo video shows a couple of types of flows and how to
get started with Power Automate yourself.
Watch this video to see a demo of Power Automate.
Introduction
Completed100 XP
 3 minutes
Today’s business world is becoming increasingly more data driven. Small and
large businesses alike use data to make decisions about sales, hiring, goals, and
all areas for which they have data. While most businesses have access to data of
one type or another, it can be intimidating for your average business user to
understand the data without a background in data analytics or statistics. Even for
those individuals who do understand the data, it can be challenging to display it
in an easily understood format.
Power BI takes intimidation and hassle out of data analysis and visualization. By
connecting to one or more of the hundreds of existing data sources through a
secure and simple interface, you can quickly and interact with and understand
your data to influence all business systems.
In this module, we will:
 Describe the business value and features of Power BI.
 Compare and contrast the different components that make up Power BI.
 Describe how to clean and transform data.
 Examine how AI insights help detect anomalies and spot trends.
 Build a basic dashboard.
 Consume Power BI reports and dashboards.

Describe using Power BI to build

data-driven analytics
Completed100 XP
 3 minutes

From customer and employee data metrics for company goals, to sales
and acquisitions, businesses are drowning in data, but this data is only as
good as your ability to interpret and communicate its meaning. That's
where Power BI (Business Intelligence) comes into play.

Microsoft Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and

connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into
coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. From data in a
simple Microsoft Excel workbook, or a collection of cloud-based and on-
premises hybrid data warehouses, Power BI lets you easily connect to
your data sources, clean, and model your data without affecting the
underlying source, visualize (or discover) what's important, and share that
with anyone or everyone you want.

Power BI consists of a Microsoft Windows desktop application called Power

BI Desktop, an online SaaS (Software as a Service) service called the
Power BI service, and mobile Power BI apps that are available on phones
and tablets.

These three elements, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service, and Power BI

Mobile apps are designed to let people create, share, and consume
business insights in the way that serves them, or their role, most
effectively.

Explore the different Power BI elements

Completed100 XP
 8 minutes
To create Power BI Solutions, there are several major building blocks. These
elements help not only what data is being presented, but also how it appears to
those users who are consuming it. Those elements are datasets, reports, and
dashboards. All elements are organized into workspaces, and they're created on
capacities.
Let’s look at each of these elements in more detail.
Capacities
Capacities are a core Power BI concept representing a set of resources used to
host and deliver your Power BI content. Capacities are either shared or
dedicated. A shared capacity is shared with other Microsoft customers, while a
dedicated capacity is fully committed to a single customer. Dedicated capacities
require a subscription. By default, workspaces are created on a shared capacity.
Workspaces
Workspaces are containers for dashboards, reports, datasets, and dataflows in
Power BI. There are two types of workspaces: My workspace and workspaces.
  My workspace is the personal workspace for any Power BI customer to
work with your own content. Only you have access to your My workspace.
You can share dashboards and reports from your My Workspace. If you
want to collaborate on dashboards and reports or create an app, then you
want to work in a workspace.
 Workspaces are used to collaborate and share content with colleagues.
You can add colleagues to your workspaces and collaborate on
dashboards, reports, and datasets. With one exception, all workspace
members need Power BI Pro licenses.

Workspaces are also the places where you create, publish, and manage apps for
your organization. Think of workspaces as staging areas and containers for the
content that makes up a Power BI app. So, what is an app? An app is a collection
of dashboards and reports built to deliver key metrics to the Power BI consumers
in your organization. Apps are interactive, but consumers can't edit them. App
consumers, colleagues who have access to the apps, don't necessarily need Pro
licenses.
Semantic models
A semantic model is a collection of data that you import or connect to. Power BI
lets you connect to and import all sorts of semantic models and bring all of them
together in one place. Semantic models can also source data from dataflows.
Semantic models are associated with workspaces and a single semantic model
can be part of multiple workspaces. When you open a workspace, the associated
semantic models are listed under the semantic models tab. Each listed
semantic model represents a collection of data. For example, a semantic model
can contain data from an Excel workbook on OneDrive, an on-premises SSAS
tabular semantic model, and/or a Salesforce semantic model. There are different
data sources supported. Semantic models added by one workspace member are
available to the other workspace members with an admin, member, or
contributor role.
Shared semantic models
Business intelligence is a collaborative activity. It's important to establish
standardized semantic models that can be the 'one source of truth.' Discovering
and reusing those standardized semantic models is key. When expert data
modelers in your organization create and share optimized semantic models,
report creators can start with those semantic models to build accurate reports.
Your organization can have consistent data for making decisions, and a healthy
data culture. To consume these shared semantic models, just choose Power BI
semantic models when creating your Power BI report.
Reports
A Power BI report is one or more pages of visualizations such as line charts,
maps, and other elements. You can create reports in Power BI from scratch,
import them from shared dashboards, or have Power BI generate them when
connecting to datasets. For example, when you connect to an Excel workbook
that contains Power View sheets, Power BI creates a report based on those
sheets. And when you connect to a SaaS application, Power BI imports a prebuilt
report.
There are two modes to view and interact with reports:
 Reading view: When a report is opened by a user, it's displayed in
reading view.
 Editing view: For individuals that have edit permissions, editing view is
used to modify the different elements on the report and how they're
presented.
When a workspace is opened, associated reports are listed under
the Reports tab. Each listed report represents one or more pages of
visualizations based on only one of the underlying datasets. To open a report,
select it.
When you open an app, you're presented with a dashboard. To access an
underlying report, select a dashboard tile (more on tiles later) that was pinned
from a report. Keep in mind that not all tiles are pinned from reports, so you may
have to click a few tiles to find a report.
By default, the report opens in Reading view. Just select Edit report to open it in
Editing view (if you have the necessary permissions).
Dashboards
A dashboard is a single canvas that contains zero or more tiles and widgets. Each
tile pinned from a report or from Q&A displays a single visualization that was
created from a dataset and pinned to the dashboard. Entire report pages can
also be pinned to a dashboard as a single tile. There are many ways to add tiles
to your dashboard, too many to be covered in this overview topic.
Why do people create dashboards? Here are just some of the reasons:
 To see all information needed to make decisions in one glance.
 To monitor the most important information about your business.
 To ensure all colleagues are on the same page, viewing and using the
same information.
 To monitor the health of a business, product, business unit, or marketing
campaign, etc.
 To create a personalized view of a larger dashboard and show all the
metrics that matter to them.
When you open a workspace, the associated dashboards are listed under
the Dashboards tab. To open a dashboard, select it. When you open an app, you
are presented with a dashboard. If you own the dashboard, you also have edit
access to the underlying dataset(s) and reports. If the dashboard was shared
with you, you are able to interact with the dashboard and any underlying reports
but won't be able to save any changes.
Template Apps
Power BI template apps enable Power BI partners to build Power BI apps with
little or no coding and deploy them to any Power BI customer. As a Power BI
partner, you create a set of out-of-the-box content for your customers and
publish it yourself.
You can build template apps that allow your customers to connect within their
own accounts. As domain experts, they can unlock the data in a way that is easy
for their business users to consume.

Describe cleaning and transforming data in Power BI Desktop

Completed100 XP
 4 minutes
When working with data from different data sources, it's not always going to be
in a format that allows it to be displayed with other data. For example, you might
be getting ready to build a device usage report that display IoT related device
details for individual customers. Typically, that data exists in multiple systems.
The customer details likely are in your organization's Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) system, while the IoT data is likely stored in a dedicated IoT
system such as Azure IoT Hub. Many times, the IoT data isn't structured as nicely
as the data in your CRM system. Some of the data may not be in the right
format, or there might just be more data than you need. In these instances, you
need to clean and transform your data. Cleaning and transforming data is how
you prepare your data and get it ready to be used. To begin transforming and
cleaning data, you use the Power BI Desktop application.
Power BI Desktop has three views:
 Report view: You can create queries to build compelling visualizations
that you can share with others. You can arrange them as you want them to
appear.
 Data view: See the data in your report in data model format, where you
can add measures, create new columns, and manage relationships.
 Model view: Get a graphical representation of the relationships that are
established in your data model and manage or modify them as needed.
Power BI Desktop includes the Power Query Editor tool, which can help you
shape and transform data so that it's ready for your models and visualizations.

To begin, select Edit from the Navigator window to launch Power Query Editor.
You can also launch Power Query Editor directly from Power BI Desktop by using
the Transform Data button on the Home ribbon.

Transforming data
As mentioned previously, transforming data is the process of putting data into a
format that is useable in your reports. Examples of the available transformations
include removing a column from the table, duplicating the column under a new
name, or replacing values.

Clean data
While Power BI can import your data from almost any source, its visualization
and modeling tools work best with columnar data. Sometimes, your data isn't
formatted in simple columns, which is often the case with Excel spreadsheets.
A table layout that looks good to the human eye might not be optimal for
automated queries. For example, the following spreadsheet has headers that
span multiple columns.

When you clean data, you might combine those rows into a single item to better
format the data to fit your needs. Or you may have a series of numeric data that
would need to be aggregated to display better. With Power Query, there are a
series of tools that you can use to prepare the data.
The purpose of this module was to introduce you to the basic concepts around
cleaning and transforming data. You can learn more about transforming, shaping,
and modeling data in Power BI here: Transform, shape, and model data in Power
BI

Describe using AI Insights to spot trends and anomalies

Completed100 XP
 7 minutes
One challenge that organizations have, is being able to easily identify trends and
detect anomalies as they occur. For example, many retail organizations see an
increase in sales during the month of December over the holiday season. This
uptick in sales is expected, but what happens if sales were down during that
month, or if they were higher in August than normal? It's important to identify
these anomalies as quickly as possible so you can take the necessary action.
Power BI’s insights feature helps organizations easily identify insights such as
anomalies and trends in your data as you interact and consume elements such
as reports, dashboards, and visualizations. It notifies you if there are interesting
insights and provides explanations for them. It works out-of-the-box on any
report, so you can automatically start getting insights from your reports without
any setup.

Power BI has multiple insights features that use artificial intelligence (AI):
 Insights for reports: Analyzes data and finds anomalies and trends in
your data as you interact with reports.
 Insights for individual visuals: Analyzes and explains the fluctuations
of data points in visuals.
 Insights for dashboard tiles: Looks at the data being used to render
that tile and presents them in interactive visuals.
 Quick Insights for datasets: Automatically generate data insights on a
dataset in the Power BI service.
 AI Insights for data models in Power Query: Provide access to
pretrained machine learning models from Azure Cognitive Services.
Notifications
Notifications are an important part of the Insights capabilities in Power BI. As
you're working on Power BI elements such as reports, Power BI automatically
runs insights analysis. When Power BI identifies insights, you're presented with a
notification. You can choose to either see the insights or ignore them.
Notifications are a great way to proactively interact with suggested insights to
ensure that you're not missing anything important such as if sales in a specific
region increased. Top insights are those insights that are noteworthy, based on
factors like recency and significance of the trend or anomaly.

Get insights on reports and visuals

The notification capabilities alert and notify you of insights as you're working on
reports. There are also many scenarios where you may just be able to get
insights as you walk through some of the different elements. As you're working
with Power BI reports and visuals, you can select Get insights to open the
Insights pane.

The pane only shows insights about the current report page, and it updates when
you select a different page on the report. As you work with individual
visualizations, you can select More options (...) in the upper-right corner of a
visual, and then Get insights to see insights about just that visual.

Insights
The Insights pane currently shows three types of insights:
 Anomalies: Represents something that is out of the ordinary from what is
expected. For example, a smart thermostat that suddenly reads the
temperature as 100 F when it's typically 72 F would be considered an
anomaly.
 Trends: Represents a pattern that is found in time-series datasets. For
example, if a company’s sales are steadily increasing through the month
of April that would represent a trend.
 Key Performance Indicator (KPI) analysis: Helps you evaluate the
current value against a defined target. For example, a company might set
a sales goal at 1.2 million, but currently they are at 1 million.
Anomalies
An anomaly is an abnormality in time-series data, such as unexpected spikes and
dips in the data. An algorithm computes a boundary around what is considered a
normal or expected value. Any value found outside this boundary is marked as
an anomaly.
There are three types of anomaly insights:
 Significant anomaly: The anomaly has a high score. Anomaly score
indicates how far the point is from the expected range.
 Recent anomaly: The most recent anomaly in the measure.
  Anomaly summary: This insight type summarizes multiple anomalies in
the measure.
When an anomaly in your data is flagged, Power BI runs an analysis across the
different dimensions in your data model to look for spikes or dips in the measure
that correlates to the anomaly. They're shown as possible explanations ranked by
strength.

Trends
A trend occurs when there's a prolonged increase or decrease in time-series
data. There are a series of steps the Power BI algorithm uses to find meaningful
trends. It first performs data smoothening, interpolation, and time-series
sampling. The trends are then identified for statistical significance based on the
slope and length of a change in value. The algorithm removes noise like
seasonality and outliers. For example, if sales jump in December, the algorithm
doesn't mark that as a noteworthy trend because it's common for sales to jump
around the holidays.
There are four main trends flagged:
 Long trend: The trend is significant and is the longest trend within a
single series or across multiple series in a visual.
 Steep trend: The trend is significant and is the steepest trend within a
single series or across multiple series in a visual.
 Recent trend: The trend is significant and is the most recent trend within
a single series or across multiple series in a visual.
 Trend reversal: Recent trend in a single series or across multiple series
in a visual where the reversal is significant, compared to the previous
trend segment.
When a trend in your data is flagged, Power BI looks for and identifies the
categories that most influenced the increase or decrease in the identified trend.
Possible explanations are ranked based on the relative contributions from
different categories to the increase or decrease in trend.

KPI analysis
KPI analysis with a target looks at the variance of the current value to its target.
It's considered significant if the variance is high or low compared to other
segments. KPI analysis without a target looks at the value itself and flags ones
that are high or low compared to other segments.
For KPI analysis explanations, Power BI looks for and identifies the categories
that have higher or lower than anticipated values. For KPI analysis with target,
possible explanations are ranked based on Z-scores of the difference of the value
from the target. Whereas for KPI analysis without a target, possible explanations
are ranked based on the Z-scores of the value itself.
Build a basic dashboard
Completed100 XP
 12 minutes
Now that we introduced you to some of the core concepts in Power BI such as
reports, dashboards, and workspaces, let’s see how these different elements
would be used to support common business scenario. Managers often want to
see how their salespeople are performing. It wouldn't be uncommon for your
manager to ask to see your latest sales and profit figures by the end of the day.
Many individuals keep those details in an Excel spreadsheet on their computer.
Historically, getting that data into a format that a manager can easily consume
could take several hours if not days.
With Power BI, we can easily create and share a dashboard with a manager by
connecting to a data source such as an Excel spreadsheet on your laptop. While
the data sources that you use might be different, the process for building and
sharing a dashboard are same.
You need to take the following steps:
 Prepare your data: Preparing the data ensures that it's in a format that
Power BI can easily consume.
 Build a report: The report contains the visuals that you want to include
in your dashboard. Depending on the scenario, reports can be built in
either Power BI Desktop or using the Power BI Service.
 Pin the report visuals to a dashboard: Dashboards are the primary
element that users use for viewing data. They can include data from
multiple reports as needed.
 Share a link to the dashboard: Any users with the link and the
necessary permissions are easily able to view and interact with the data.
Prepare the data
The first thing you need to do is ensure that your data is ready to be consumed.
Depending on the data source and the volume of data you're working with, you
may need to do some data cleansing and transforming using Power Query. If you
are connecting to an Excel spreadsheet, make sure the data is in a flat table, and
that each column contains the right data type. For example, text, date, number,
or currency. It's also important that you have a header row but no columns or
rows that display totals. Total operations are handled in Power BI as we create
the visuals.
You can see that there's a header column, and each column has the correct data
type associated with the data.
Upload your data to the Power BI service
The Power BI service is where you're able to create reports that connect to your
data sources. This includes Excel files that live on your computer. With a few
simple clicks, you can attach to a dataset, and Power BI creates a blank
dashboard where you're able to place visuals later.
In the image, we attached to sample financial data. It shows the completed
Financial Sample dataset, and the blank dashboard.

Build your report

Once you connected to your data, you can either create a new report or edit an
existing report that was created previously. Then we can begin editing the report
by using the editing view. On the right are the Visualizations, Filters,
and Fields panes. Your Excel workbook table data appears in the Fields pane. At
the top is the name of the table, financials. Under that, Power BI lists the
column headings as individual fields.
Different visualizations are available that you can use to display the data in your
report. Different visualizations can be added to the report based on the data that
you want to communicate. In the image, multiple bar charts are being used to
showcase the number of units being sold. Additionally, map control is included to
show sales volumes per country/region.

Each visualization includes a series of filters and controls that can be used to
impact how the data is being presented. For example, if you want to change the
sum of units sold to display profit by date, you could switch the Y-axis from Sum
of Units sold, to Sum of Profit.
More visualizations are being added to Power BI to reflect how business is being
done. For example, there's a Power Apps visualization that lets you build a
canvas app directly in your Power BI report, which is connected to the Power BI
data set. As people interact with the data, the data in the Power App changes.
For example, you could create a canvas app that includes actions such as
sending emails or scheduling meetings. As you drill down on a Power BI report,
you identify customers we haven't talked to in a while. The embedded canvas
app lets us initiate actions, such as sending an email, right from the Power BI
report.
Pin to a dashboard
After you have all your visualizations on your reports, you can build your
dashboard. Dashboards are easy to build because you're just determining which
visuals from your created reports you want to include.
In the image, we're taking the Profit by Date visualization and pinning it to a
dashboard.
Since dashboards can have visuals from multiple reports, it makes it easy to
have detailed dashboards that include data from multiple data sources, even if
some of those data sources might be unrelated.

Share a link to your dashboard

Initially dashboards that you create are only visible to the person that created
them. However, Power BI makes it simple to share dashboards with other
individuals. You can share your dashboard and underlying report with any
colleague who has a Power BI account. They can interact with it, but they can't
save changes. If you allow it, they can reshare with others or build a new report
based on the underlying dataset.

Now that we talked about the process of building a dashboard using Power BI,
let’s see the process in action.
Click-through demo: Build a Power BI dashboard
In this click-through demonstration, you're guided through the process of
connecting to data, building a basic, report, and pinning report visualizations
onto a Power BI dashboard.
Build a Power BI dashboard
If you're interested getting some hands on experience creating a Power BI
Dashboard, you can view a complete end-to-end tutorial here: Tutorial: From
Excel workbook to a Power BI report.
Consider the business value of Power BI
Completed100 XP
 5 minutes
It's now common knowledge that data can improve business processes and
increase revenue. A real-world example helps to unite the concepts that we've
already covered and allow you to see the potential of Power BI in action. One
such case is that of the Miami Heat, a professional basketball team in the United
States, whose Power BI adoption is 70% across the organization.
The Miami Heat used the powerful analysis and visualization features of Power BI
to completely transform their customer interactions and business operations.
With the help of Power BI, they were able to boost season ticket sales by 30%
and save approximately $1 million on operations.
Basketball is about far more than watching the skill of the players. There's a
sentiment and a bonding over shared experiences that come from the viewing
and the participation of sports. The Miami Heat wanted to better understand the
family of customers that enter their arena or interact with their many online
platforms. The challenge was to understand a single customer when there are so
many of them. This situation is where Microsoft technologies come into play,
Power BI chief among them.
Miami Heat on Power BI
By analyzing their data in Power BI, the Miami Heat operations team has been
able to increase revenue, but also improve the allocation of resources by
predicting customer behavior.
“Using Power BI and the entire Azure data platform, we can predict attendance
for all 44 games of the season within hours of the schedule being released,” says
Edson Crevecoeur, Vice President of Strategy and Data Analytics for the Miami
Heat. “Last season, we got within 4 percent of the actual numbers for the whole
season, two months before any games had been played. This puts us in a better
position to identify opportunities, mitigate risks, and manage our resources in a
more efficient fashion. Ultimately helping all areas of our business focus on
enhancing the fan experience.”
As the Miami Heat effectively demonstrate, using Power BI and other Microsoft
technologies can lead to significant returns for not only revenue, but your
business users' ability to make beneficial decisions.
Introduction
Completed100 XP
 3 minutes
The core components of the Microsoft Power Platform such as Power Automate,
Power Apps, and Power BI provide a foundation to empower citizen developers
and professional developers to create modern business solutions. There are
times when organizations want to make their data in Microsoft Dataverse
available to external audiences. Customers, for instance, could then directly
access their shopping history or support tickets. The easiest way to securely
enable this access is with Power Pages.

In this module, we will:

 Explore Power Pages
 Describe the business value of Power Pages
 Examine the process for building a basic site
 Describe the use cases for creating sites with Copilot
Explore Power Pages
Completed100 XP
 6 minutes
In today’s world, websites do more than just provide information. They're an
important part of establishing your organization’s identity and a critical
component in building loyalty. Organizations create sites to help assist customers
in performing tasks, such as managing their account details or providing
customers with a support portal that includes self-service options.
Microsoft Power Pages is a platform for creating, hosting, and administering
modern external-facing business websites. Power Pages enable both low-code
makers and professional developers to rapidly design, configure, and publish
websites that function seamlessly across web browsers and devices.

Power Pages provides you with rich customizable templates, a fluid visual
experience through a reimagined design studio, and a new integrated learning
hub to quickly build sites that suit your unique business needs. The learning hub
provides makers with a guided learning experience. That guidance makes it easy
to find the correct documentation, tutorials, videos, and guided tutorials to get
started and build websites. The guided learning pane opens inside the design
studio without covering the canvas where you're editing your site, allowing you
to have a side-by-side view of tutorials and learning content. With Power Pages,
you can build sites by using your organization's business data stored in Microsoft
Dataverse. This same data is what you use for building apps, workflows,
intelligent virtual agents, reports, and analytics with other Power Platform
components.

Simplified authoring experience for makers

You want your website to look professional. You want it to be easy to use, and
you want it to perform the required tasks. To make site creation easier, makers
can quickly create new sites directly from the Power Pages home page by using
the default template or choosing existing industry-based starter templates.

These templates provide you with an excellent starting point that provides a
professional look and feel. From there, makers can easily tailor the look and feel
of the site and its functionality to meet their specific needs.
Power Pages is based on Bootstrap. Bootstrap provides support for building
websites that are responsive, mobile-friendly, and available in various form
factors. This capability means that you don't have to build separate versions of a
site for different form factors. Sites not only look great while viewing on your
computer’s desktop, but they're also optimized to provide the best users
experience when viewed on mobile devices.

Sometimes elements that are created using the designer don't meet the specific
need of an organization. Makers can collaborate with pro developers in fusion
teams to extend the functionality using Visual Studio Code and the Power
Platform Command-Line Interface (CLI) to create powerful business application
websites.
Like all Power Platform products, Power Pages provides deep integration with
other Microsoft Power Platform components. Let’s take a closer look at using
Power Pages and the other Power Platform components.
 Dataverse enables users to securely store and manage data. This is used
by business applications and your Power Pages sites. Use model-driven
app constructs like forms, views, charts, and dashboards to easily surface
Dataverse data.
 Power Apps enables anyone to create no-code/low-code custom mobile
and web apps to share and collect data and streamline business
processes. Using Power Apps to create an app that uses SharePoint to
store content is a popular way to quickly build basic intranet sites. Power
Pages is ideal for websites focused on external audiences that require
more secure access to your business information.
 Power Automate simplifies the creation of automated workflows. With
Power Pages, you can use Power Automate plug-ins, workflows, and
automated cloud flows. Using Power Automate allows you to extend the
business logic and interact with data and events coming and going in and
out of Dataverse.
 Power BI allows anyone to access visually immersive and interactive
insights from business data. With Power Pages, integrate with Power BI to
access components like reports, dashboards, and tiles. Use the embed
capability to surface data that sits outside of Dataverse.
Describe the business value of Power Pages
Completed100 XP
 3 minutes
Let’s look at an example where Power Pages can provide value to an
organization.
Contoso Real Estate is a property management and real estate company that
sells and manages properties for clients. At any point, they can have hundreds of
properties listed with them, and be working with just as many potential buyers.
This volume makes it hard for their real estate agents to interact with customers
and provide them with the details they need. Often, customers prefer self-
support options. They want to have a centralized area where they can go to
identify the properties currently listed and get answers to specific questions.
By using Power Pages, Contoso Real estate can create and externally facing
websites that provide clients with self-support options.
For example, a dedicated property listing site would:
 Improve customer interactions: By providing customers with a web
interface, they can manage their individual profiles. They can define the
style of home they want, their preferred neighborhoods etc. Contoso can
automatically send information to the customer when a new property that
matches their criteria is listed.
  Simplify data operations: By providing external customer with secure
access to Contoso's property listings, Contoso can ensure that customers
always have the most current information.
 Improve day-to-day operations: Customers can identify properties they
are interested in, and request a showing or attend a scheduled open
house.
 Build relationships with buyers: Buyers with questions can engage in
forums where they not only can ask questions of other buyers, but they
can also engage with Contoso’s staff. This ensures that they're getting
accurate information.
All these capabilities can be built using a low code platform that lets you create
targeted sites in no time.
Build a Power Pages site
Completed100 XP
 15 minutes
Now that we examined the different elements and capabilities of Power Pages,
Let’s take a high-level look at the process of building a site using Power Pages.
At a high-level, the process of building a site with Power Pages resembles these
steps:
1. Create a website.
2. Define the pages.
3. Select a theme and brand your site.
4. Connect to Dataverse data.
5. Secure your site.
While this might be a simplified look, it's accurate. Let’s dive into steps in more
detail.
Create a website
Sites can be created from the Power Pages maker portal by selecting Create a
site. There are many different templates that you can choose from based on
different scenarios or industries. In addition, there are industry templates for:
 Government
 Education
 Financial
Once you select the template you want to use, you need to provide a site name,
specify the site address, and language.
It can take from 15 to 30 minutes for your new site to be created.
Use design studio
The main tool that is used to build sites is the design studio. Design studio
simplifies the process of creating and modifying site pages, connecting your site
to Dataverse, and defining site security. Design studio is broken down into
workspaces. Workspaces focus on specific functions like site branding, security,
and managing connections to your Microsoft Dataverse instance.
There are four primary design workspaces:
 Pages workspace: Allows makers to create, edit the design, and arrange
the webpages in your site.
 Styling workspace: Used to personalize the look and feel of your site by
adding styling and theming to your site.
 Data workspace: Allows you to create and modify Microsoft Dataverse
tables used in data-driven web applications
 Set up workspace: Primary administrative area for side administration and
management.
Create Pages

The Pages workspace enables you to design and build webpages that directly
within your Power Pages site. Each page can be tailored to your specific needs by
using the different no-code and low-code widgets that are available. These
widgets include text, image, video, Power BI reports, lists, forms, and others.
When you create a new page, you can apply an existing page template, or you
can create your own custom layout.
Brand your site
Organizations often spend thousands of dollars researching and developing their
branding. Everything from their logo to the colors they use represent the
organization’s brand. Power Pages contains a robust set of themes and tools you
can use to style your site to best fit your overall business. There are multiple
preset themes you can apply to help you get started, and then apply further
customization with Power Pages easy to use styling menu.
The Styling workspace lets you apply global site styles. You can apply corporate
branding updates and review the changes in the preview on the right side of the
app window. Power Pages includes several preset themes to help get you started.
For each theme, you can customize the color palette, background color, font
styles, button styles, and section margins.
Connecting to data
Makers often use a database to store records related to business information
when creating a site. Microsoft Power Platform's cloud-based data
service, Dataverse, stores information like a traditional database, but with added
benefits such as security features, analytics, and automation. When working in
the Data workspace, makers can create and modify Dataverse tables directly in
the design studio by using the Data workspace.

In the Data workspace, a maker can use pre-existing or new Dataverse model-
driven app views to build list components. The maker can use pre-existing or
new Dataverse model-driven app forms to create basic or multistep
form components on pages. These elements can then be used inside your sites.
For example, real estate properties forms you create could be used to display
real estate properties on your site.
Securing your site
Whenever you're exposing data externally, take the necessary precautions to
limit access to authorized individuals. With Power Pages, you can set up different
security components to ensure that important data isn't being exposed to just
anyone.
The Set up workspace is where you can configure different aspects of your
power pages site, such as configuring the authentication providers you want to
use and defining different security settings and site visibility settings.

Use cases to use Copilot to streamline the process of building a Power

Pages site
Completed100 XP
 7 minutes
When using Power Pages to create websites, makers can help to streamline this
process by using Copilot to help create various parts of a website through natural
language instructions. Copilot can be used to do things such as create a new site
or amend an existing site.
Items you can do with Copilot in Power Pages include:
 Create a relevant website copy and provide image suggestions for a
webpage.
 Retrieve protected website content for authenticated users and public
website content for anonymous users.
  Create forms and Dataverse tables.
Use Copilot to create a website
The easiest way to get started using Copilot is to use it to help with creating a
website. You provide a description of the site you want to build, or you can select
a suggested description of the site.
Descriptions might include something like the following:
 Build a website for public transportation for residents of a city to view
routes and fares.
 Create a site for customers to help find financial advisors at a bank based
on their qualifications and areas of expertise.

Based on the description that you provide, copilot generates a site name and
web address. You can make any necessary modifications to these suggestions
before moving to the next step.
Copilot generates a home page layout, through which you can scroll. If you don't
like the layout that was generated, you can select Try again and Copilot
generates a new layout.

Copilot generates other pages that could be used in the site based on the
description. Describe one or more pages and select Done to complete the site
creation.
Once your site is created, you can manually go back and modify any of the
content generated by Copilot to better fit your need at any point. Additionally,
you can continue to use Copilot to make site modifications by describing what
you want to modify.

Introduction
Completed100 XP
 3 minutes
The core components of the Microsoft Power Platform such as Power Automate,
Power Apps, and Power BI provide a foundation to empower citizen developers
and professional developers to create modern business solutions. Organizations
can use any of the Power Platform complementary products to take their
solutions to the next level. You can use artificial intelligence to create intelligent
automation scenarios. You can create an externally facing website that provides
your customers with the ability to create and view data in Microsoft Dataverse.
Power Platform offers complementary solutions that make it easy to create more
advanced solutions.
Explore Copilot Studio
Completed100 XP
 4 minutes
Customers are always looking for faster and more precise self-service support
options, while businesses aim to satisfy their customers with faster, better
customer service. One way organizations can accomplish this objective is with
copilots. A bot is a form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that simulates human
conversation through a chat interface. Bots listen for keywords and phrases that
relate to the library of known, common customer issues (topics) that are stored
in the bot. The bot then returns answers quickly and iteratively as the customer
continues the chat. The bot continues to check if the customer's question was
answered, and then refines its selection of topics to solve the customer's
problem.
Copilot Studio empowers teams to easily create powerful copilots using a guided,
no-code graphical interface without the need for data scientists or developers. In
Copilot Studio, bots are referred to as copilots. Copilots created in Copilot Studio
address many of the key issues with bot building in industry today. Copilot Studio
eliminates the gap between the subject matter experts and the development
teams building the copilots. Copilot Studio so also eliminates the long latency
between teams recognizing an issue and updating the copilot to address it. It
removes the complexity of exposing teams to the nuances of conversational AI
and the need to write complex code. Also, it minimizes the IT effort required to
deploy and maintain a custom conversational solution.
Using Copilot Studio helps your organization to:
 Better empower your teams: Your teams can build copilots without
needing intermediaries, coding, or AI expertise.
 Reduce costs: You can automate common inquiries. Agents then have
time to focus on more complex issues.
 Improve customer satisfaction: Customers have access to an all day,
self-help solution to help resolve their issues through comprehensive,
personalized copilot conversations.
Let’s look at some highlights of Copilot Studio
 Get started in seconds: Copilot Studio is a software-as-a-service (SaaS)
offering. It allows you to easily sign-up, create your copilot, and embed it
into your website with just a few clicks. There's no infrastructure to
maintain or complex systems to deploy.
 Empower your subject matter experts: Using Copilot Studio, you are
in control. Your Subject Matter Experts (SME) can create copilots quickly
and easily using a novel, intuitive, code-free graphical interface
eliminating the need for AI expertise or teams of developers.
 Enable rich, natural conversations: Microsoft’s powerful
conversational AI capabilities enable your end users to have rich multiturn
conversations that quickly guide them to the right solution. And, unlike
most products on the market, there's no need to retrain AI models. You
just need to provide a few short examples of the topic you want Copilot to
manage. Build the conversation using the graphical editor, and your
Copilot is ready to manage customer requests. You can even try out your
changes in real-time in the test pane.
 Enable copilots to act: Copilots that can chat with your users are great,
but copilots that can act on their behalf are even better. With Copilot
Studio, you can easily integrate with services and back-end systems out-
of-the-box, or through hundreds of easy-to-add custom connectors using
Power Automate. This capability makes it simple to create a copilot that
not only responds to the user, but also acts on their behalf.
  Monitor and improve copilot performance: Copilot Studio lets you
keep an eye on how your copilots are performing using powerful metrics
and AI-driven dashboards. Easily see which topics are doing well and
where the copilot can improve, and quickly adjust to improve
performance.
The image shows an example of the analytics available from a bot such as the
number of sessions the bot had, resolution rate, and engagement.

Describe the components of Copilot Studio

Completed100 XP
 5 minutes
When you create copilots with Copilot Studio, you author and edit topics. Topics
are discrete conversation paths that allow users to have a conversation with a
copilot that feels natural and flows appropriately. Those copilot conversations do
need to be within a single copilot. Creating a copilot with Copilot Studio is easy to
do with the no-code authoring canvas. There are multiple ways you can manage
how topics interact, how you want the conversation to flow, and what it should
feel like. It's also easy to test the copilot without having to fully deploy the
copilot whenever you make a minor change. There are also lesson topics that
guide you through topic authoring, from simple to complex scenarios, and
default system topics. You can also choose what language you want your copilot
to use.
Topics
In Copilot Studio, a topic defines how a copilot conversation plays out. You can
author topics by customizing provided templates, create new topics from scratch,
or get suggestions from existing help sites.
A topic has trigger phrases, which are phrases, keywords, or questions that a
user is likely to type that are related to a specific issue. Topics also have
conversation nodes, which are what you use to define how a copilot should
respond and what it should do.
The AI uses natural language understanding to parse what a customer type and
find the most appropriate trigger phrase or node. For example, a user might type
"Open hours" into your copilot. The AI is able to match that to the Store
hours topic and begin a conversation that asks which store the customer is
interested in, and then display the hours the store is open.
You can see how the copilot conversation works in practice by evaluating it in
the Test copilot pane. This preview lets you fine-tune the topic until you're
ready to deploy it without having to exit the Copilot Studio portal.
Entities
A significant part of copilot conversations in Copilot Studio is natural language
understanding, which is the ability for the AI to understand a user's intent. For
example, natural language understanding is involved when a user might say "I
tried to use my gift card, but it doesn't work." The copilot is able to route the
user to the topic related to gift cards not working, even if that exact phrase isn't
listed as a trigger phrase.
One fundamental aspect of natural language understanding is to identify entities
in a user dialog. An entity can be viewed as an information unit that represents a
certain type of a real-world subject, like a phone number, zip code, city, or even
a person's name.
Actions
You can enable your copilot to perform an action by calling a Microsoft Power
Automate flow. Flows can help you automate activities or call backend systems.
For example, you can use flows with end-user authentication to retrieve
information about a user after they sign in.
You can call flows from within topics, as a discrete Call an action node. You can
utilize flows that were already in your Power Apps environment, or you can
create a flow from within the Copilot Studio authoring canvas.
Publishing
With Copilot Studio, you can publish copilots to engage with your customers on
multiple platforms or channels. These include live websites, mobile apps, and
messaging platforms like Microsoft Teams and Facebook. After you published at
least once, you can connect your copilot to more channels.
Each time you want to update your copilot, you publish it again from within the
Copilot Studio app itself. This process updates the copilot across all the channels
where you inserted or connected to your copilot. You can also configure a Copilot
Studio copilot to provide authentication capabilities, so users can sign in with any
OAuth2 identity provider, such as Microsoft Entra ID, a Microsoft account, or
Facebook.
Create a basic copilot
Completed100 XP
 15 minutes
Now that we examined key elements of a copilot, let’s examine the process for
building a high-level bot. Bots are created using the Copilot Studio designer. In
the designer, you can not only create bots, but you can also manage any existing
bots you might have.

At a high-level, the process for creating and publishing a copilot with Copilot
Studio is as follows:
1. Create a copilot.
2. Build out the topics you want for the copilot.
3. Test the copilot.
4. Publish the copilot and deploy it to specific channels.
Create the copilot
There are different elements that make up a copilot. Each of the elements
impacts different things such as how the copilot behaves, who can access it etc.
For example, for each copilot, you can specify things such as the skill the copilot
possesses, how conversations flow, and where the copilot is deployed. New
copilots can be created from the Copilot Studio home page. As you create a
copilot, you need to provide a name and specify the language it speaks.
In the image, we see an example of the Create a Copilot screen where you define
the bot’s name and the language it speaks. Additionally, you can point the
Copilot to a website that can be used to populate generative answers.

Copilot Studio not only includes an intuitive authoring canvas, but it also includes
powerful and flexible capabilities from Bot Framework Composer. These
capabilities provide designers with a single authoring canvas where any member
of the team, irrespective of their skill level, can collaborate on copilot building -
from low-code makers through to pro developers alike.
This experience provides designers with:
 Rich response authoring that supports both text and speech variations.
This capability helps to make your copilots more engaging across a wider
variety of channels.
 Deep Power Fx integration for data and variable manipulation and
authoring productivity improvements, including cut, copy, and paste.
 Copilot authors can select from a set of prebuilt Adaptive Card templates
in Copilot Studio and fill them in with their data. Cards can enrich
conversational experiences and address business scenarios.
  Conversational language understanding enables designers to build custom
natural language understanding models to predict the overall intention of
an incoming utterance and extract valuable information from it.
Define your copilot topics
As mentioned previously, topics are dialog trees that describe how your copilot
responds to a user's question. Each copilot you create includes multiple system
topics that oversee things such as greeting customers, escalating conversations,
and ending conversations. You can add as many different topics as are required
based on your needs.
A topic consists of two primary elements:
 Trigger Phrases: Represent phrases users might enter that triggers the
topic. For example, a trigger phrase for a store hours topic, might be
something like, "When are you open?" A typical topic could have twenty or
more trigger phrases defined.
 Conversation Path: This element defines the path that is taken based on
input provided by the customer. Conversation paths are made up of
different conversation nodes. The nodes do things such as displaying
messages, asking questions, switching between topics and more.

The following conversation nodes are the most used:

o Show a message: Displays a message to the user.

o Ask a Question: Presents the user with a question. The user’s

answers are stored for later. Question nodes provide designers with
the ability to finely control reprompt behavior and create custom
validation rules.
o Call an Action: This conversation node enables Power Automate to
bring in information from other services. An example would be
interacting with a weather service to display local forecast details.
o Redirect to another topic: Sends the end user to another topic.

The image shows an example of what a Store Hours topic might look like. The
copilot asks the user for which stores they want hours. Based on their answers,
they're presented with either the store hours for the Redmond or Seattle
locations. On the right side of the screen, you see the trigger phrases defined for
this topic.

Test your content in real time

As you're authoring your topics, you should evaluate them in real-time to see if
they worked as you expected. To help with this process, there's a test pane that
you can use to evaluate your copilot. It can be displayed by selecting Test your
copilot in the lower left corner of the application.
Often, while testing, you're trying to find out if the topic is performing as
expected. But you also want to ensure that it's interacting as expected with the
other topics in your copilot. Enabling Track between topics at the top lets you
follow along with the copilot as it executes your dialog. You start to see parts of
your dialog tree highlighted as the copilot gets to that portion of the dialog.

As you interact with the copilot, you're able to see how the copilot is progressing
through the conversation path.

Publish your copilot

Once you're fine with the content authored in your copilot, you can publish your
copilot so it can be used across different channels such as websites, social
media, and more. This is accomplished by selecting Publish in the navigation
menu.

Initially the copilot is published to a demo website where you can evaluate it, but
it could also be published to different channels based on your needs.
Now that we examined the steps to build a copilot using Copilot Studio, let’s look
at the process in action.
Describe use cases for Generative AI bots
Completed100 XP
 4 minutes
Generative answers are a popular topic right now. Generative AI enables
organizations to be able to provide more natural conversations to their
customers. Generative answers in Copilot Studio allow your copilot to find and
present information from multiple sources, internal or external, without created
topics. Generative answers can be used as primary information sources or as an
alternative source when authored topics can't answer a user's query. As a result,
you can quickly create and deploy a functional copilot. You don't need to
manually author multiple topics that might not address all customer questions.
When a copilot can't find a matching intent (topic) for the user's query, it can use
generative answers and tries to answer a question. This behavior is called
"Generative Answers for fallback." If the user's intent isn't matched to topics or
generative answers, the fallback system topic is used. System topics can
escalate a query for the copilot.
Generative answers aren't limited to fall back scenarios. Your copilot can also use
other web sites, external or internal web sources, and knowledge sources such as
SharePoint or OneDrive.
Generative answers can use these sources:
  External resources:
o Bing Web Search—doesn't require external configuration.

o Bing Custom Search—requires external configuration.

 Internal resources:
o SharePoint

o OneDrive

o Documents uploaded to Dataverse

o Custom data (internal or external): supply your own source, such as

a Power Automate Flow or from Skill
Describe AI Builder
Completed100 XP
 8 minutes
AI Builder is a Microsoft Power Platform capability that provides AI models that
are designed to optimize your business processes. AI Builder enables your
business to use intelligence to automate processes and glean insights from your
data in Power Apps and Power Automate. With AI Builder, you don't need coding
or data science skills to access the power of AI. You can build custom models
tailored to your needs or choose a prebuilt model that is ready to use for
common business scenarios.

Add intelligence to your business

In AI Builder, you can choose from multiple model types that are suited to
different business scenarios. Here are several examples:
 If you want to use intelligence to detect your products in images, you can
refine a custom AI Builder object detection model. With a customizable
model, you build, train, and publish it for your intended use.
 If you want to use intelligence to automate your expense reports by
scanning and processing business receipts, you can use a prebuilt AI
Builder receipt scanning model. All prebuilt models allow you to go straight
to productivity.
 If you want to design a marketing campaign based on patterns in your
historical data, you can use a custom prediction model tailored to your
business, using your own historical data.
There are two primary types of AI Builder models:
 Prebuilt: These are models that help you to add intelligence to apps and
flows without having to gather data and then build, train, and publish the
model.
 Custom: These are models that help you create more complex or targeted
AI solutions. You build these models from the ground up.
The following prebuild models are available:
 Business card reader: Extracts information from business card images.
If it detects a business card in the image, the AI model extracts
information such as the person's name, job title, address, email, company,
and phone numbers.
 Category classification: The prebuilt category classification model is a
ready to use AI model that is configured to classify your text into
categories that are useful for a specific business scenario. The first
prebuilt category classification AI model is built around customer feedback
uses. Check back for more category classification prebuilt models or check
release plans to see what might be coming.
 Entity extraction: The prebuilt entity extraction model recognizes
specific data from text that's of interest to your business. The model
identifies key elements from text, and then classifies them into predefined
categories. This can help to transform unstructured data into structured
data that's machine-readable. You can then apply processing to retrieve
information, extract facts, and answer questions.
 ID reader: You can use the identity document (ID) reader prebuilt model
to extract information from passports and US driver licenses, social
security, and green cards. The model extracts information such as the
person’s first name, date of birth, or gender.
 Invoice processing: The invoice processing prebuilt AI model extracts
key invoice data to help automate the processing of invoices. The invoice
processing model is optimized to recognize common invoice elements like
invoice ID, invoice date, amount due, and more.
  Key phrase extraction: The key phrase extraction prebuilt model
identifies the main points in a text document. For example, given input
text "The food was delicious and there was great service!", the model
returns the main talking points: "food" and "great service." This model can
extract a list of key phrases from unstructured text documents.
 Language detection: The language detection prebuilt model identifies
the predominant language of a text document. The model analyzes the
text and returns the detected language and a numeric score from 0
through 1. Scores close to one indicate higher confidence in the result. The
detected language is returned as the "script" of the language. For
instance, for the phrase "I have a dog," it returns "en" instead of "en-US."
The response for languages that can't be detected is unknown.
 Receipt processing: Receipt processing is a prebuilt model that uses
state-of-the-art optical character recognition (OCR) to detect printed and
handwritten text and extract key information from receipts.
 Sentiment analysis: The sentiment analysis prebuilt model detects
positive or negative sentiment in text data. You can use it to analyze social
media, customer reviews, or any text data you're interested in. Sentiment
analysis evaluates text input and gives scores and labels at a sentence
and document level. The scores and labels can be positive, negative, or
neutral. At the document level, there can also be a "mixed" sentiment
label, which has no score. Aggregating the sentence scores determines the
sentiment of the document.
 Text recognition: The text recognition prebuilt model extracts words
from documents and images into machine-readable character streams. It
uses state-of-the-art optical character recognition (OCR) to detect printed
and handwritten text in images.
 Text translation: The text translation prebuilt model translates your text
data in real time across more than 60 languages. This prebuilt model could
help remove language barriers within your company. The text translation
model can also detect the language of the text data you want to translate.
Describe the lifecycle to create an AI Builder model
Completed100 XP
 3 minutes
To add intelligence to your business:
1. Choose an AI model type: Use the model type that suits your business
needs. Choose from a growing set of AI solutions.
2. Connect data: Select your business-specific data from the available
options.
3. Tailor your AI model: Depending on the type of model, you can tweak
custom models to optimize how your AI performs.
4. Train your AI model: Training is an automatic process. It teaches your AI
model how to resolve your business problems based on your business data
 and tailoring. For example, the model can be trained to recognize your
products on an image. When trained, your AI model can generate insights
such as the result of a prediction, or the list and number of objects
detected in an image.
5. Use insights from your AI model: Use the results from your AI model
across Power Platform to create solutions that meet your business needs,
even if you have no coding skills. For example, you can create a flow that
automates document processing in Power Automate or an app in Power
Apps that predicts whether a supplier is out of compliance.