Let’s go back a bit earlier.
When I joined the company (where I stayed for more than 5 years) in 2015, I did not know about automation, VBA, or advanced Excel, and Power Platform wasn’t a thing.
After my probation period, a big chunk of manual tasks was assigned to me. That was the time when I first started to look into automation opportunities and found some blogs about SAP automation.
I did the standard VBA-virgin approach: record, modify, and “deploy” to create my very first process automation to upload some credit limit information to customer master data. Of course, I have spent more time building my automation than doing it 500 times manually. It worked, and it became my hobby (and my superpower according to others) to assess and automate processes.
Fast forward to 2017, I believe, when I first saw the Power Apps in our App Launcher. Just to play around, I created a customer lookup app using static Excel as a “database” and an approval request automation, which were never used. I didn’t know what to use as a database (I haven’t used Sharepoint back then at all), I didn’t know how to make it dynamic, so I just left the Power Platform completely, but it stayed in the back of my head.
I did some automation here and there with Flow to save email attachments for example, but nothing major. The big breakthrough hit me when I moved to a different role. It was in the operations, we were creating data visualizations and insights in Microstrategy. One day a manager asked me to create a VBA for her massive Excel matrix (it had all the role profiles in the department, the expected skill levels, and all the training relevant to the roles). That was the moment when I said, this could be done in PowerApps as a pilot. I turned those heavy Excel matrices into (Excel) tables and uploaded them to PowerApps as static files.
After “some” tweaking, it worked, and it looked awesome, thanks to an internal volunteer, who had graphic design as a side hustle (now full-time). I’m still learning how to create a great-looking app, but I’m much more fluent in the other stuff after creating many apps and automation with Power Platform.
The app was able to show the training selections per role profile, per skill, show the expected skill levels per role profile. Later on, I’ve added new features, such as an annual skill assessment (which is a self-assessment, followed by a direct manager approval). This was the time when I first used the Sharepoint list as the dataset, stored the responses of members of the department. This assessment was done previously by a licensed product, which wasn’t available that year, so I had to create something.
This is my path to build my very first app (with a 500+ user base) with PowerApps (I always say it’s a PowerPoint with Excel formulas).