Power Apps | Vlad Talks Tech

Power Apps + Power Automate: Better Together | Create PDFs Without Premium Connectors

Vlad Catrinescu — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Want to generate PDFs from Power Apps using Power Automate without paying for premium connectors? In this real-world demo, Microsoft MVP Laura Rogers shows how to build a Statement of Work generator using Power Apps, Power Automate, OneDrive, and SharePoint — with no code and no extra license requirements!

Check out Laura’s training courses.

Video Summary

Power Apps + Power Automate = Better Together. Each Power Platform product is powerful on its own, but combining them unlocks real business solutions. Laura showed us how easy it is to integrate them without overcomplicating things.
You Don’t Always Need a Flow. Common tasks like sending emails or updating multiple lists can often be done directly in Power Apps using connectors or patching—no flow required! Keep it simple when you can.
When You Do Use a Flow, Keep It Lean. Laura’s demo used a Power Apps trigger and passed just one parameter—the project ID. From there, the flow grabbed all the data it needed, generated an HTML file, converted it to PDF via OneDrive (free!), and saved it in SharePoint.
Smart UI Design Matters. The Power App showed progress while the flow ran, then revealed the “View PDF” button only when the file was ready. Wrapping the flow call in a variable and using conditional visibility made the experience smooth and intuitive.
Training and learning resources are key. Laura offers over 45 hours of training on Power Apps, Power Automate, SharePoint, and more at iwmentor.com. If you want to build solutions like this, her courses are a fantastic resource!

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

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Transcript

Each product inside the Power Platform is amazing on its own, but most enterprises get even more value when they use them together. What if we try to use two of my favorite products in the Power Platform—Power Automate, number one in my heart, and Power Apps, a close second—together to build a real business solution?

Today, I’m super happy to be joined by Microsoft MVP and good friend Laura Rogers. Laura, thank you so much for being here.
“Thanks for having me.”

Today we’re at the Power Platform Community Conference recording this, and this week you had a session called Power Automate and Power Apps Better Together. I think that was the title, right?
“Yes.”

And you told me right before recording that you showed something really cool and that there are different ways to actually integrate them. So what I want you to show me is everything about this because usually I only do the Power Automate stuff. I want to learn how people call it from Power Apps.
“Okay. Well, you may notice that when you’re in Power Apps, you actually have a Power Automate section that lets you integrate Power Apps and Power Automate. But my whole session was really about the concept of all the other ways that you can use this integration without having to use that specific way.”

A couple of things that I went over were: you can send emails directly from a Power App using the Office 365 Outlook connector, and write some functions so that it instantly goes straight from the Power App without needing a flow. That’s one common thing that people think they need a flow to do.

Another thing is you can just use patching. So if you had a situation where somebody fills out a form and you need to not just submit that one form, but maybe create a couple of other things in other lists automatically, you can just use patching from your Power App. Those are common things that people might need to automate, and again, you can avoid using a flow altogether.

But even if you do need a flow, you could still do it a different way. You could have a flow that triggers when the item gets created in SharePoint, Dataverse, or wherever your item is. Your trigger can just be based on the item getting created or modified. So yet again, you don’t need to use this integration for any of those scenarios.

That’s a big question I had in my workshop on Sunday. People asked me this exact scenario: Is it better to do it from the Power App or from the data source? And I’m the team data source. This way it’s a bit more separate. If something needs to be debugged, I have two different systems—one that saves into SharePoint and one that triggers in SharePoint. I’m more team “keep them separate.” But I guess it depends on the scenario.
“It definitely does. I like to try and keep it as simple as possible—have fewer moving pieces. So in situations where I can just have a command that sends an email straight from the app and that’s all that’s needed, something simple, if you only have one action, absolutely.”

So yeah, it’s definitely a per-situation decision that you’re going to make.
“Yeah.”

Well, you told me you built something cool in your session—a full process.
“Yes. So I’ll go ahead and run it and then show you what it does, and then we’ll dig in and I’ll show you how I built it. So again, I was talking about all these reasons not to use this integration, but here’s a good example. I have customers and a list of customers in here, and then each customer has a list of projects. So here are all the Adventure Works projects. For each project, I can go to the form with all the information about that project. And then here’s where the magic happens: I’m working with a new customer, I’ve got a new project, and I need to generate a new statement of work. So I just click ‘Create Statement of Work.’”

You can see the little dots going across. What it’s doing is kicking off a flow that’s creating a file, putting the data about that project in the file, and then converting it to PDF. It just finished running, so now this little “View PDF” button appears.
“Okay, wow, it already opened.”
“Yeah. So there is the statement of work that it just generated based on the data in that form, and now it’s a PDF file.”

That is really awesome because in the UI, you can see that it’s working, and then the other button appears at the end.
“That is really cool. Can you add a loading screen?”
“Yeah, you could.”
“Can you get the ‘Working on it’ GIF? You know, remember the SharePoint ‘Working on it’ GIF?”
“Oh yes.”
“Can you add that in there?”
“There is actually a control in Power Apps that does that functionality.”

So it took me to where the file was created in SharePoint. That’s the library where it got created. So that’s how it works. Now let’s go look at what the flow is actually doing.

This flow is based on the trigger called “When Power Apps calls a flow.” You decide what information you want to send over from the Power App to the flow. The simplest way is you don’t need to send all these separate fields—if you have the ID of the item, that’s all you need. So all I’m sending over is the project ID from the Power App.

The flow uses the “Get Item” action to retrieve all the data about that project. Since this is a parent-child relationship (a customer might have multiple projects), I have a lookup field in the project to the customer. So then I do another “Get Item” to get that one customer using the customer lookup ID. Now I have all the information about the project and the customer, and I can use all that in my statement of work.

What I did was create an HTML file—a simple, no-frills, no-premium-connector way of generating a file. I used Copilot to create the HTML for me because I didn’t feel like writing all this code. I told Copilot to create a statement of work in HTML and gave it a list of all the fields I wanted to insert. It wrote the HTML and put placeholders where the parameters would go. I pasted that code into a Compose action, inserted the fields like customer name, project start, project end, and project description, and then used the free “Convert to PDF” option in OneDrive.

So I create the HTML file temporarily in OneDrive, then use the Convert File action to convert it to PDF. After conversion, I create the PDF file in my Statement of Work library in SharePoint using the file name and content. I also created a sharing link for that file because it’s more reliable across devices. One thing I forgot to add is deleting the temporary OneDrive file so they don’t pile up.

Finally, I respond back to the Power App with the sharing link. In Power Apps, the button uses flow.run() syntax to call the flow. To wait for the flow and get information back, you wrap it in a variable using the Set function. Then, when the variable is populated with the URL, the “View PDF” button appears. I also set the display mode so the button grays out after use.

For the back button, I clear the variable so the next time you open another project, it doesn’t show the previous link.

That’s the whole solution: kicking off the flow, waiting for it to come back, and making the UI interactive so users only see what works.

I love how cool you built it—it looks so simple now. At first, I thought it would be complicated with a lot of steps, but this was super easy.
“Oh, great. I’m glad you liked it.”

One final question: Do you do Power Automate training like me?
“Yes.”
“What do you think about Microsoft moving the actions back under, like in classic?”
“Oh, they’re changing the interface. You missed the keynote—they’re bringing it back like in classic instead of being on the left. Being able to see all that information, especially in training screenshots, is huge. I love that.”
“I like it, but I feel like I have to update a lot of things now.”
“Oh my gosh, that’s so true. We both do. By the end of the year, the actions will be under a classic-like designer but with a modern look.”

Thank you so much. You mentioned you do a lot of training—can you tell everybody where they can find it?
“Sure. My company is IWmentor, which stands for Information Worker Mentor. It’s iwmentor.com. I have about 45+ hours of training on SharePoint, Power Apps, Power Automate, OneDrive, Planner, Copilot, Microsoft Forms, Microsoft Lists, and more. I have advanced classes and an Ultimate plan that includes everything. You can subscribe monthly or yearly. I have a huge Cyber Monday sale coming up with a 40% discount.”

Awesome. I’ll make sure to have a link in the description below so you can access it easily. If you want to build cool things like this in a simple way, check it out. If you’re a business professional or information worker, there’s no better training out there. Thank you so much for your time.

For everybody here, if you enjoyed this video, please like it, subscribe to the channel, and on the screen right now, you’ll see another video we recorded at the Power Platform Community Conference. See you there.

PPCC24 Keynote Highlights for Power Apps & Power Automate

Vlad Catrinescu — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 12:00:00 GMT

The 2024 Power Platform Community Conference is happening this week, and in this video, you will learn the most important announcements about Power Automate and Power Apps that Microsoft shared during the keynote!

Video Summary

Power Platform Growth: The platform now has over 48 million monthly active users, an increase of 8 million. Microsoft humorously compared this to six Taylor Swift-era tours!
Power Automate Enhancements:
- Pinning Details: You can now pin up to two details for actions or triggers, making it easier to copy-paste information without constantly opening and closing windows.
- Multimodal Recording: Power Automate Desktop now supports multimodal recording in public preview, allowing you to demonstrate tasks while explaining them to Copilot, which then builds the flow for you.
- Generative Actions: These new actions simplify complex flows by allowing Copilot to generate logic and actions based on your instructions.
Power Apps Updates:
- Co-Authoring: General availability of co-authoring in Power Apps Canvas apps lets multiple users work on the same app simultaneously, enhancing collaboration.
- Model-Driven Apps: New Copilot features help find and enter information more efficiently, even extracting data from free text like emails.
Power Apps Plan Designer: This new tool helps you plan your entire solution by uploading documents and letting the designer create the necessary components, making the planning process more streamlined and efficient.
Next Year’s Conference: The next Power Platform Community Conference is scheduled for October 28-30, 2025, in Las Vegas. Use code VLAD100 to save 100$ on your registration!

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Video Transcript

Hello everyone! We are live from Las Vegas, and day one of the Power Platform Conference 2024 just finished. Since I get to attend in person, I know how important it is to keep up to date even if you are at home and can’t make it. I wanted to do this quick video for you where I share the top announcements for Power Automate and Power Apps, and I’ll try to cover both in under 10 minutes. So, let’s get started!

First of all, let’s start with some numbers. The Power Platform now has over 48 million monthly active users, which is 8 million more than the last time we shared numbers. This is quite amazing! To tell you a funny thing from the keynote, Microsoft somehow invented a new unit of measurement: a Taylor Swift Eras Tour, which is equivalent to 8 million people. So, the Power Platform is now used by six Taylor Swift-era tours. Microsoft Teams has 320 million monthly active users, so I’ll let you do the calculation on how many concerts that is. And yes, I am a Swifty; I did go to a concert this year.

There were three keynotes, but since this is the Power Platform Conference, let me focus on that one. The keynote was delivered by Charles Lamanna, Business Applications and Platform CVP at Microsoft. As usual, Charles opened the keynote by thanking the community. Did you know there are currently over 5.8 million people in the Power Platform community, and a question gets answered every 6 minutes? It’s amazing to see the power of the community in the Power Platform. If you’re not a member of that community, make sure you join it.

Now, let’s talk about features, starting with my favorite one: Power Automate. The top announcements are: first, you can now pin up to two different details for an action or a trigger. Has it ever happened to you that you had to copy-paste between actions or copy-paste information from the trigger, and it’s just annoying because you have to open and close it? Now, you can just pin two of them side by side and become more productive quickly. You might be wondering why I’m not talking about Copilot. Of course, most of the other announcements were about Copilot, so I just had to throw that one in there.

Talking about Copilot for the Power Platform, the first big announcement is Power Automate Desktop. The multimodal recording for Power Automate Desktop is now in public preview. This means that when you open Power Automate Desktop, you’ll be able to not only tell Copilot what you want but also demonstrate it. You click on record, perform the action, and explain it to Copilot. Then, Copilot will build that desktop flow for you. I cannot wait to try that in action; I’m sure it will be amazing.

Another AI feature for Power Automate is generative actions. If you watched my European Power Platform Conference keynote highlights from June of this year, you might remember AI flows. Microsoft is taking a different direction with them based on feedback from the private preview. These will now be rolled into generative actions. Imagine you’re building a flow with many conditions and switching statements, making it quite messy. With generative actions, you add the logic, tell Copilot what it should do, and at runtime, it will build the logic and actions for you. This should make flows a lot easier, but we won’t know how good it is until we try it.

Now, let’s talk about Power Apps. The first announcement I’m super excited about is the general availability of co-authoring in Power Apps Canvas apps. If you want to work with a colleague or consultant simultaneously, you can now do it. You can see where different people are in the app and the exact component they’re working on, making collaboration much easier.

For model-driven apps, the keynote showcased some amazing new Copilot functionality that helps you find information in your app. If you need to enter data from a long email, you can copy the text from Outlook, and paste it into your app as free text, and Copilot will understand the text, extract entities, and fill in the data for you.

The final announcement, which I’m most excited about, is the Power Apps Plan Designer. Often, we plan a solution before we start working on it, including database models, personas, and the number of apps needed. Now, you can upload all those documents as part of a prompt, and the Power Apps Plan Designer will understand them and help you create all the different parts of your solution. This includes multiple apps as part of your solution, not just one.

This is it for this quick video on the top announcements for Power Apps and Power Automate at the Power Platform Community Conference 2024. If you’re not here, make sure you join us next year. It has been announced for October 28-30, 2025, still in Las Vegas. Use code VLAD100 to save when you register. I hope to see you there. Thank you, everyone!