Create an app using the new image import in Power Apps

Earlier this week a new feature was released in preview. Take any image of a form and turn it into an app. All using the standard out of the box Power Apps editing experience.

Create an image

I’ve seen a few people testing this new feature with nice looking images. But I’m not good at drawing, so I used paint.net and my finger to drop an interesting form.

Ok, nothing complicated here. As you can see my boxes are far from straight. And my writing isn’t very good either. So typical stuff that you could do on a board in a meeting room.

Importing this gave me the following form created within an app.

But now imagine if you just took a bit more care of things.

Creating a better form

And when we process that through Power Apps, we can see how Power apps is recognizing each element on the page.

All I had to do was replace that drop down Text Input with an actual combobox control. Notice that there is no drop down available, but in most cases the combobox is preferred anyway.

Once that is done you can choose to create your data using this same import wizard.

All you have to do is specify your field names and table details.

Do note that this is still very much in Preview. And the app will probably not be as good as you could create it yourself. Just as an example, note that the internal names of the fields mean that solution packages and publishers are not supported at this stage

But, this is a great start for even faster app development. And all starts with you drawing a picture or mock-up and the using the image import the development jobs becomes just that little easier to get started with your development.

What’s next?

Well the obvious next step of course is that you take a photo of yourself while thinking about an app and Power Apps will make all your dreams come true.

Personally I like a beach app.