How to use Copilot to build a canvas app in Microsoft Power Apps

The beauty of Microsoft’s Power Apps platform is its no-code approach to building applications. In other words, virtually anyone can be an app creator, even if you don’t understand the complexities of code and software development. But you’ll still need to know the basics of data modeling, how to write formulas with Power Fx, and the various nuances of pulling your data into the user interface.

With Copilot, things just got a lot easier! Now you can build apps through conversation. Just describe your app idea, and Copilot will get busy building it for you. It’ll create the underlying Dataverse tables for your app and then pull that data out to a user interface you can modify until it’s just right.

In this article, I’ll guide you through building a canvas app from scratch with Copilot as your helper.

To edit the application, you can ask Copilot to do things like style a single control, bulk edit all controls, add a screen, or configure navigation. As of today, these are the controls Copilot supports:

• Screen

• Horizontal and vertical containers

• Gallery

• Edit form

• Button

• Text label

• Text input

Here are some ideas of things you can change:

• Add a new screen

• Add a new button

• Add a new text label

• Change all buttons to blue

• Add a button to the selected container

• When clicking on Button1, navigate to Screen2

I was also able to do things like adding an icon to the header of a screen.