Microsoft Certified: Power Platform Fundamentals - (PL-900) Exam Questions

• Yes, Jack is correct. It is possible for Flow can have multiple connections.

• One environment only can have up to exactly one Dataverse Database. Then the flow instance can only access the exactly same Dataverse Database, but multiple times in a flow.

• Common Data Service has been renamed to Dataverse.

Application and Solution Development

In Teams, people collaborate around documents in different ways – some you create yourself, some you create in collaboration with teammates, or others you acquire from trusted sources.

Power Platform and Dataverse bring this same model to building and using apps, chatbots, flows, and data. Dataverse includes a solution that is used for developing low code and no code applications directly within Microsoft Teams.

In addition to building your own applications and solutions, you can discover solutions and templates from trusted sources in a gallery, easily install them, and optionally customize them for your organization. In the future, Dataverse will also support classic import and export of solutions.

With data visualization being a core piece of many solutions, it was important to support graphs and charts in applications. The Common Data Service extends these capabilities even further with support for paginated reports.

In Dataverse, Power Automate is used for the creation of workflows. It does not include support for business rules or classic workflows found in the Common Data Service.

Dataverse is focused on low code/no code development. Certain capabilities such as developer API access and plug in support will not be available at launch, but can be found in the Common Data Service.

The Common Data Service and Power Apps currently support model driven apps today and these will be coming to Dataverse later this year.

In addition to use within Teams, the Common Data Service can also be natively accessed in Microsoft Excel, synced with Microsoft Outlook, and power applications written for mobile, web, and desktop.

You should recommend Business process flows to create visual guides to ensure that users enter data and perform tasks in a consistent manner.

• Flows Power Automate includes several types of processes, each designed for a different purpose:
  Automated flows. Create a flow that performs one or more tasks automatically after it's triggered by an event.

  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/flow/get-started-logic-flow

• Button flows. Perform repetitive tasks simply by tapping a button on your mobile device.

  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/flow/introduction-to-button-flows

• Scheduled flows. Create a flow that performs one or more tasks on a schedule such as once a day, on a specific date, or after a certain time.

  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/flow/run-scheduled-tasks

• Business process flows. Ensure that people enter data consistently and follow the same steps every time they work in an app by creating a business process flow.

  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/flow/business-process-flows-overview

• Workflows and actions. Dynamics 365 customizers may be familiar with the classic Common Data Service processes, which are workflows and actions.

  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/flow/workflow-processes

Common Data Service has been renamed to Dataverse. The Power Platform Analytics Usage report is the default reports seen by the logged in environment admin. It provides total app launches and daily active users across all apps in the environment. Admins can filter the view with attributes like device platform, player version, country, province / state, and city.

Admin Analytics for Power Apps

Analytics for the environment admin is available at the Microsoft Power Platform Admin Centre. The admin reports provide a view into environment level usage, errors, service performance to drive governance, and change management services to users. These reports are available for canvas apps only and not available for model-driven apps.

To access these reports, sign in to the Power Platform Admin Centre and select Analytics → Power Apps. Reports appear in a menu bar at the top of the page.

Who can view these reports?

Admins with the following roles and a license can view the reports in Power Apps analytics:

• Environment Admin - can view reports for the environments that the admin has access to.

• Power Platform admin – can view reports for all environments.

• Dynamics 365 admin - can view reports for all environments.

• Microsoft 365 Global admin – can view reports for all environments.

Scott should use an edit form because it is tied to an underlying data table and is the easiest way to allow users to update values in the underlying data.

• The data table control can be used for viewing data in a data source but cannot be used for editing that data.

• The gallery control is used to allow users to view or select items in a list but cannot be used for editing values.

• A vertical container can be used to position controls on a screen, but it is not used for editing the data in a data source.

Edit form and Display form controls in Power Apps

If you add a Display form control, the user can display all fields of a record or only the fields that you specify. If you add an Edit form control, the user can edit those fields, create a record, and save those changes to a data source.

If you add a Gallery control, you can configure it to show a table in a data source and then configure a form to show whichever record the user selects in the gallery. You can also add one or more Button controls that the user can select to save edits, cancel edits, and create a record.

There are many connectors are available for Power Apps and the list continues to grow.

How Power Platform works with Microsoft 365 apps and 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 help be 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 for Business 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 one to two 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 five 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 mimics 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.

• No, Sulu has not selected the correct method. A model-driven app is the correct method to allow the definition of a custom Sitemap.

Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, connectors and data platform that provides a rapid application development environment to build custom apps for your business needs. Using Power Apps, you can quickly build custom business apps that connect to your business data stored either in the underlying data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) or in various online and on-premises data sources (SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and so on).

Apps built using Power Apps provide rich business logic and workflow capabilities to transform your manual business processes to digital, automated processes. Further, apps built using Power Apps have a responsive design, and can run seamlessly in browser or on mobile devices (phone or tablet). Power Apps "democratizes" the custom business app building experience by enabling users to build feature-rich, custom business apps without writing code.

Power Apps also provides an extensible platform that lets pro developers programmatically interact with data and metadata, apply business logic, create custom connectors, and integrate with external data.

Model-driven apps in Power Apps

Model-driven app design is a component-focused approach to app development. Model-driven app design doesn’t require code and the apps you make can be simple or very complex. Unlike canvas app development where the designer has complete control over app layout, with model-driven apps much of the layout is determined for you and largely designated by the components you add to the app.

Model-driven app design provides the following benefits:

• Rich component-focused no-code design environments

• Create complex responsive apps with a similar UI across a variety of devices from desktop to mobile

• Rich design capability

• Your app can be distributed as a solution

The approach to model-driven app making

At a fundamental level, model-driven app making consists of three key focus areas.

• Modelling business data

• Defining business processes

• Composing the app

Modelling business data

To model business data you determine what data your app will need and how that data will relate to other data. Model-driven design uses a metadata-driven architecture so that designers can customize the application without writing code. Metadata means “data about data” and it defines the structure of the data stored in the system.

Composing the model-driven app

After modelling data and defining processes, you build your app by selecting and configuring the components you need using the app designer.

• Create the company users in the Azure Active Directory.

Environment scope

Each environment is created under an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenant, and its resources can only be accessed by users within that tenant. An environment is also bound to a geographic location, like the United States. When you create an app in an environment, that app is routed only to datacentres in that geographic location. Any items that you create in that environment (including chatbots, connections, gateways, flows using Microsoft Power Automate, and more) are also bound to their environment's location.

Every environment can have zero or one Microsoft Dataverse database, which provides storage for your apps and chatbots. Whether you can create a database for your environment depends on the license you purchase for Power Apps and your permissions within that environment. More information: Pricing info

When you create an app in an environment, that app is only permitted to connect to the data sources that are also deployed in that same environment, including connections, gateways, flows, and Dataverse databases. For example, consider a scenario where you've created two environments named Test and Dev, and created a Dataverse database in each of the environments. If you create an app in the Test environment, it will only be permitted to connect to the Test database; it won't be able to connect to the 'Dev' database.

You can also move resources between environments.

Harley can use the Form and Gallery controls in a canvas app to connect to a data source.

• A form is used to view, edit, and create a single row for a data source. To configure a form, you select its data source.

• A gallery displays a list of rows from a data source. To configure a gallery control you select its data source.

• A button has a formula that can change the properties of other controls. A button can cause data to be saved but the button is not linked to a data source.

• A screen is not linked to a data source. The controls added to the screen can be linked to data sources.

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.

• FILTER is a common formula used in canvas apps to restrict the rows from a data source or collection.

• The OnSelect property for a button contains the actions to perform.

• Formulas such as SubmitForm and Patch are used to save data to a data source.

• Formulas are not used to share a canvas app.

• Formulas can only be used when building a canvas app.

• There is no equivalent formula for the WEBSERVICE Excel function that retrieves XML data from an internet URL.

When using Microsoft Power Apps, you don't have to write complicated application code the way that a traditional developer does. However, you must express logic in an app and control its navigation, filtering, sorting, and other functionality. This is where formulas come in.

If you've used Microsoft Excel functions, you'll be comfortable building apps in Power Apps. To create a formula, you'll combine one or more formulas with the required and optional parameters. Here are some common functions and an explanation of what they do:

• Filter - This function is often used with galleries or tables of data to narrow down the rows returned from your data source. You do this by specifying one or more columns in your data set to perform a logic test on, which will allow you to return data that falls in a certain date range, has a set value, or was created by the user for example.

• Match - This function allows you to check a value to see if it follows a given pattern. You can use this to check if the user entered a properly formatted email address and, if they did not, show them a warning that a valid email is required. This function serves well for conditional formatting.

• Distinct - This function allows you to return the unique values from a list of data, making it easier to build dynamic dropdowns that show users only the valid values for the given column.

• Math functions - Power Apps includes a range of math formulas for working with your data from the simple such as Sum or Average to the complex such as Atan and Sin to work with radians.

You can configure canvas apps with formulas that not only calculate values and perform other tasks (as they do in Excel) but also respond to user input (as an app requires).

• In Excel, you build formulas that, for example, populate cells and create tables and charts.

• In Power Apps, you build similar formulas as you configure controls instead of cells. In addition, you build formulas that apply specifically to apps instead of spreadsheets.

For example, you build a formula to determine how your app responds when users select a button, adjust a slider, or provide other input. These formulas might show a different screen, update a data source that's external to the app, or create a table that contains a subset of the data in an existing table.

You can use formulas for a wide variety of scenarios. For example, you can use your device's GPS, a map control, and a formula that uses Location.Latitude and Location.Longitude to display your current location. As you move, the map automatically tracks your location.

The WEBSERVICE function returns data from a web service on the Internet or Intranet.

Notes:

• The WEBSERVICE function is only available in Excel 2013 and later for Windows.

• The WEBSERVICE function may appear in the Excel for Mac function gallery, but it relies on Windows operating system features, so it will not return results on Mac.

• Yes, it is possible to create a canvas app that scans and parses documents using Azure Cognitive Services and then adds the appropriate information to Dynamics 365 Sales.

Cognitive Services provides machine learning capabilities to solve general problems such as analyzing text for emotional sentiment or analyzing images to recognize objects or faces. You don't need special machine learning or data science knowledge to use these services.

Cognitive Services is a group of services, each supporting different, generalized prediction capabilities. The services are divided into different categories to help you find the right service.

Use Cognitive Services when you:

• Can use a generalized solution.

• Access solution from a programming REST API or SDK.

Use another machine-learning solution when you:

• Need to choose the algorithm and need to train on very specific data.

What is machine learning?

Machine learning is a concept where you bring together data and an algorithm to solve a specific need. Once the data and algorithm are trained, the output is a model that you can use again with different data. The trained model provides insights based on the new data.

The process of building a machine learning system requires some knowledge of machine learning or data science.

Machine learning is provided using Azure Machine Learning (AML) products and services.

What is a Cognitive Service?

A Cognitive Service provides part or all of the components in a machine learning solution: data, algorithm, and trained model. These services are meant to require general knowledge about your data without needing experience with machine learning or data science. These services provide both REST API(s) and language-based SDKs. As a result, you need to have programming language knowledge to use the services.

How are Cognitive Services and Azure Machine Learning (AML) similar?

Both have the end-goal of applying artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance business operations, though how each provides this in the respective offerings is different.

Generally, the audiences are different:

• Cognitive Services are for developers without machine-learning experience.

• Azure Machine Learning is tailored for data scientists.

How is a Cognitive Service different from machine learning?

A Cognitive Service provides a trained model for you. This brings data and an algorithm together, available from a REST API(s) or SDK. You can implement this service within minutes, depending on your scenario. A Cognitive Service provides answers to general problems such as key phrases in text or item identification in images.

Machine learning is a process that generally requires a longer period of time to implement successfully. This time is spent on data collection, cleaning, transformation, algorithm selection, model training, and deployment to get to the same level of functionality provided by a Cognitive Service. With machine learning, it is possible to provide answers to highly specialized and/or specific problems. Machine learning problems require familiarity with the specific subject matter and data of the problem under consideration, as well as expertise in data science.