This post is not about solving problems. Or business real life case-studies. This post is about what can you do with tools from Office 365 suite. I am documenting here the solution I built to make my home a little smart and to make my life easier.
I’m a big fan of working with PowerApps and creating business solutions using that tool. Until last week I wasn’t aware, that when I use specific permissions to access data sources (SharePoint in that case) inside my app, the end user who is going to use that app will be asked for permissions, to be able to use that application.
Customer asked me if this is possible to add handwritten signature to a PDF generated using tools available in Office 365. My first thought was “no”, then I checked that there is “Pen input” control in PowerApps, so it was like “yes”. Then again, after searching “how” this signature can be put inside a document, I thought this is a “no”.
I recently found myself in a situation, when I needed to calculate a date difference between two datetime values in Power BI excluding weekends. The request seemed first as an easy thing, until I found out, that Power BI doesn’t have any function allowing to achieve it easily.
PowerApps is getting more and more powerful tool to create business apps in the “no-code” approach. Using SharePoint as the data source is somehow natural (although there are alternatives, like an SQL Server or Common Data Service) thanks to their tight integration.
Have you ever been struggling with a lack of the possibility to clear a number, person or lookup column using PowerApps? Well, I recently found myself in a situation, where I needed to be able to clear such columns in my application, but found out, that this is not possible (maybe not yet).
Building an intranet using modern SharePoint I was asked by a customer, if this is possible to show information from their facebook @workplace portal. I started digging and reading the documentation only to realize, that no matter if I were using modern or classic approach, still there are no ready-to-use scripts from facebook, allowing to copy-paste and then be able to display ex. information from Newsfeed.
This may seem trivial, but if you want to create a Flow, that is parameterized, where a name of a group and list of members is passed as the request parameters then it turns out it is not that straightforward.
In Microsoft Flow there is a set of actions, that allow to work with Office 365 Groups. There is also one dedicated to adding new members (only “Members”. There is no way currently to add “Owners”).
Recently my customer asked me to create a dashboard, to monitor completion of tasks in a workflow. The idea was to highlight completed, on track and overdue tasks with different colors. First I thought about using SharePoint list with Modern Experience, and column formatting. But then I was asked, not only to highlight rows for tasks, but also their grouping header – as there were many tasks created per each group of tasks and the customer wanted to see status of a whole group ad-hoc, without a need to drill down.
I recently was asked a question: how can I use the signature from the Nintex Mobile inside a document being generated by the Generate Document action? Unfortunately this is not yet feasible only using Nintex products. This is because Nintex Workflow for Office 365 is not handling correctly the binary data (it loses null bits) so what I proposed was to use Microsoft Flow.