Tomorrow you’ll be at a trade show where you’ll meet interesting people, and you’re already looking forward to it. What you’re not looking forward to is the administrative burden of processing all the lead information the day after the show. By the time you’ve entered all the lead data correctly into the CRM, another day will have quickly passed. After all, you’ve been away from the office for 24 hours, and when you return, there are other priorities that demand your attention first.
You want to respond more quickly. Every lead needs to go straight into the CRM so that sales and marketing can focus on the next steps. There’s just one problem… the trade show is tomorrow, and there are no developers available. Don’t worry—there’s a solution. Create a PowerApp. If you know how to use PowerPoint and Excel functions, you'll be able to create an attractive form that feeds leads into your CRM.
You don't have to take our word for it. See for yourself if it really is as easy as we say to create a PowerApp. Put it to the test and follow the step-by-step guide below.
What You'll Need
• A Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment. Don't have a Dynamics 365 environment available? No problem. You can create a trial account via https://trials.dynamics.com/. In our opinion, “Dynamics 365 for Sales” is the best choice.
If you create a new Microsoft login in addition to an existing Microsoft account, make sure you are signed out of your other Microsoft login or browse in Incognito/In-Private mode.
• After setting up the Dynamics 365 environment You'll also automatically have access to PowerApps.
Where to start?
You can't get started without any knowledge at all. The following crash course (in English) explains the minimum information you need to create a Power App:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/paths/create-powerapps/
In this online course, you will learn:
• the ways you can access the tools for creating PowerApps (webapps.powerapps.com)
• how to automatically generate an app for managing data. With this, we had actually almost achieved our goal.
• How to customize the layout and functionality of your automatically generated PowerApp. The automatically generated apps are interesting because you can see how they’re built. You can learn valuable insights from them that you can apply to your own app.
• how to manage the different versions of your app and how to use and share your app.
Just as you create different slides in PowerPoint, you create different screens in PowerApps.
On each screen, you can place buttons, text boxes, and labels, which you can make interactive by assigning one or more “Functions” to them.
What's particularly interesting is that you can connect to a data source (in this example, our Dynamics 365 environment) without writing a single line of code.
To work effectively with “Functions” for PowerApps, We recommend using the handy website below to find out which feature you need and how to use it: https://docs.microsoft.com/nl-be/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/formula-reference
Here are 2 more useful links related to PowerApps:
- PowerApps Documentation
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/ - Microsoft PowerApps Blog
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/
The result
Our simple PowerApp consists of three screens: a home screen, the lead form itself, and a confirmation screen.
Home Screen
Our home screen features a background image and a button labeled “START.”.
We've assigned two functions to the START button:
Through the Function NewForm We create a new, blank form. Next, we display the screen containing the form using the Function Navigate.
LeadForm screen
You can add a form to your screen by Insert > Forms > Edit.
And now for the most important part: you need to ensure that the data from the form is automatically imported into Dynamics 365. This requires a connection to the Data Source.
Select the form, and in the right-hand column, specify which table from which data source you want to link to your form.
We'll set our Dynamics 365 trial environment as the data source and select “Leads” as the entity type.
Next, you can create a form by simply checking the fields of the "Lead" entity type that you want to include in your form.
You can also manage the layout of your form by configuring its properties.
You can easily assign the “SubmitForm” function to the “SEND” button, and the connection automatically ensures that A new lead is created in Dynamics 365.
On the “ContactInformation” form itself, we’ll add a “Navigate” function so that the “Thank You” screen is displayed after the data has been successfully submitted to the data source.
Thank You Screen
The “BACK” button takes the user back to the HOME screen.
