IW Mentor

There are multiple reasons to consider this course; maybe one will be why you choose to take it, but I had all of them.: * You are relatively new to PowerApps but want to learn more; * You know InfoPath is on its way out and are concerned about how PowerApps can be used to replace all those InfoPath forms; * Office 365 is becoming, if not already, an essential part of the IT at your organization, or ones you have involvement in, and need to understand this app; * You are a geeky nerd and PowerApps seems like a good thing to know; * You have enjoyed Power Hour with Laura and can't get enough of her presentations. I started on day 1 having looked at PowerApps but understanding nothing at all about it, how to start with it, how to get those cool looking screens, how to connect it to data and have it be interactive with users when it runs - essentially nothing at all. By the end of the first hour, all of that was behind me and I was on my way to actually using PowerApps. The remainder of that day, and the next three, those of us attending the class were exposed to a wide range of topics, tips, techniques all contributing to a solid foundation and in some cases expertise to use the product. We attended the course as a web presentation, and technically it went very well. High quality video and audio, and Laura's casual style, as you might know from her YouTube videos and Power Hour presentations, puts viewers at ease and makes the class more enjoyable. Afterwards, the video and slides were available online. This is not trivial. I have reviewed both the slides and video many times when developing my own PowerApps, using the class examples to coax out the expressions and methods I needed. And the class material contained lots of them. Rather than focus on particular details of the material covered, I would summarize it into several broad categories: understanding the elements that can go onto a screen, how they interact with data sources, how the properties of screen elements can be set or modified, and how to make it all "pretty." The class accomplished those very well. Those are my favorite pros about the class, but I do have a few negatives. Since the class ended, and I have worked on my own PowerApps, I discovered by extensive searching and trial and error things that were not exactly covered in the materials nor presentation. I have run into puzzling scenarios that seemed perfectly straightforward until I tried to put them into place, and wished more had been covered in class. There were a few areas that got no coverage; the emphasis was on SharePoint (lists) as data sources (and which are most of mine), but I would have been pleased to learn more about creating my own connectors to some unusual data sources as well, like ODBC data bases and MySQL, e.g. I would not count these as serious negatives, however. PowerApps is a huge topic, and you might need your 10,000 hours to get very proficient (provided it is not just 10,000 one hour apps). Q&A was a big part of each class, and topics benefited from those. If you take the course, I highly recommend that you do more PowerApps work than I did before it starts. You will get a lot more out of it by putting more into it before the class starts. When I reviewed the slides and video trying to use it, I had a lot of "Ah Ha!" moments - "So that's what she meant." Maybe the course materials would evolve so that prior to the start, attendees would get a video or slide presentation and a few homework assignments that act like pre-requisites. But even if you go in clueless like I did, you will come out knowing a great deal.

The four days were filled with lots of useful information. Now I have to figure out how to get all the info into my own world :)