How to – Use Power Apps Ideas (preview) to generate Power Fx Formulas.

Let us have a quick look at the powerful Power Apps Ideas feature with a few examples.

Power Apps Ideas feature works for –

Items property – Gallery and Data table control.
Data Sources – Microsoft Dataverse, Microsoft Lists, Excel, SharePoint.
Data Types – Text, Whole Number, Decimal Number, Date and Time, Choice, Boolean.
It is only available in environments in the US region with en-us as the browser’s default language.
Check the list of supported Functions

The feature can be controlled from the Settings within the App.

Let us check some of the examples of natural language transformation to Power Fx Formulas.

We have a sample canvas app with the gallery control bound to Contacts (Dataverse).

Select the Gallery control, and navigate to the Ideas tab.

Let us first sort the contacts by Last Name. As we type we get the IntelliSense support.

We have our condition ready to sort by Last Name now let us click on Get ideas.

We can see the formula generated for the same. We can click on Appy to apply the formula.

As a result of applying the formula, we have the contacts sorted by Last Name.

Let us try a filter – filter contacts where the first name starts with N.

On applying the formula, the result –

Another example of a filter based on Created On.

Filter based on text –

Filter with multiple And conditions –

At times we would have to tweak the generated formula to get the desired result if it is interpreted differently.

We saw the transformation of the natural language, now let us check the transformation of the examples to Power FX Formulas, for this let us select the fields inside the gallery.

As an example, if we only want the initials of the first and last name instead of the full name, we can change the name to the initials and click on Get Ideas.

Let us change it to C M, followed by selecting Get ideas and Apply.

Next, let us change the date format to include the seconds part and the name of the month.

From –

Here we added the name of the month and the seconds in the example and clicked on the Get ideas, which generated the formula, followed by Apply.

We can see the result as expected.