Creating a PowerApp with a SharePoint list as its datasource

PowerApp is a Microsoft service that lets you quickly create apps for displaying and manipulating data. In this blog post, we will be going through how to create a PowerApp for saving, viewing, and editing, info that is saved as a SharePoint list and is accessible to everyone in an organisation.

First, we will look at creating a SharePoint list from an Excel sheet.

1. Open an existing Excel sheet that you want to use for your PowerApp. Select the data in the Excel sheet and format it as a table.

2. Login to SharePoint. From the New tab, select App.

3. Search for “Spreadsheet” and click Import Spreadsheet from the search result.

4. Browse the Excel sheet you used in Step 1 and click Import.

NOTE: You might face one of these issues when trying to import the Excel sheet to SharePoint as a list.
- Error: “Specified file is not a valid spreadsheet or contains no data to import.”
Solutions that worked for me: add SharePoint URL to your browsers trusted sites list.
- Error: “This feature requires a browser that supports ActiveX controls.”
Solution that worked for me: as I was using Google Chrome on a Windows machine, installing the Internet Explorer (IE) tab extension on Google Chrome, then open SharePoint from the IE tab. The IE tab is not available for OSX.

You have successfully imported the Excel sheet table as a list in SharePoint.

5. We will now use this list to create a PowerApp. To do this, from your list, click on the PowerApps drop-down control, on the menu bar, and select Create form app.

A new PowerApp with the SharePoint list as datasource will be automatically generated. This PowerApp displays a list of items. You can view the item details by clicking on (>) next to each item. You can also edit the details of an item using this PowerApp.

Your PowerApp is now ready to be published so that it can be useful to everyone in the organisation.

Sabina Pokhrel