Is it worth it to learn Power Platform from scratch in 2026 ?
How long does it usually take to be job ready.
By scratch i mean the scartchhh. Zero knowledge.

One of the most common questions I get from people interested in joining our SPGuides Academy training program is:

"How can I practice SharePoint, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Copilot Studio on my own?"

My usual recommendation is to start with a Microsoft 365 trial. Microsoft often offers Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 trials (typically around 90 days, depending on eligibility and availability), which give you access to most of the services you need for hands-on learning.

If you're looking for a longer-term option, another good choice is the Microsoft 365 Business Basic plan. It's relatively affordable and gives you a Microsoft 365 tenant where you can practice SharePoint, Power Automate, Microsoft Teams, and many day-to-day scenarios for an entire year if you keep the subscription active.

For Copilot Studio, Microsoft also provides a trial, so you can explore building AI agents without purchasing a full license immediately.

Personally, I believe the best way to learn isn't by watching videos alone. Create real projects such as:

• An employee leave request app
• A document approval workflow
• An IT helpdesk ticketing system
• A visitor management solution
• A simple AI agent that answers questions from SharePoint documents

Building real solutions teaches you much more than following tutorials.

I'm curious—how do you practice Power Apps, Power Automate, or Copilot Studio?

• Do you use a Microsoft 365 trial?
• Do you pay for a Business Basic tenant?
• Do you have a Microsoft 365 developer environment?
• Or do you have another approach that works well?

I'd love to hear what has worked best for you and what you'd recommend to beginners.

Any tips on clearing pl 400 exam.

Little back ground I have the PL 900 and I currently work as Sharepoint admin/dev and I want to transition into power platform consulting/developing. I was a data analyst initially but slowly started learning Sharepoint and was able to get the role I am currently working on.

Hello everyone,
I am facing a problem in the dev environment. In the entity account i have a custom field  called « new_siret ». Each time i created a new account using the api the field is always null. All the other fields are there except that one. I checked everything (plugins, workflows, flows, business rules) but there is nothing affecting it value.  So i added « Prefer : return=representation » and the value in respone is null.
{

"@odata.context": "https://mycrmorg.crm12.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.2/$metadata#accounts(name,new_siret,aps_testapi)/$en…/$entity%22),

"@odata.etag": "W/\"42939765\"",

"accountid": "dc8f43c2-3484-f111-ab0f-70a8a5507408",

"name": "BNP PARIBAS",

"new_siret": null

}

We have a 3-stage native Power Platform pipeline: Development → UAT → Production, with two deployment stages configured — "DEV to UAT" (source: DEV, target: UAT) and "UAT to PROD" (previous stage: DEV to UAT, target: PROD).

When we run a UAT to PROD deployment, the deployment history record for that run shows:

• Source = our Development environment (full name, e.g. "Contoso App - DEV")
• Source environment ID = matches our DEV environment's ID exactly, not UAT's

This is confusing us because we'd expect the source for a "UAT to PROD" stage to reflect UAT, not DEV.

Our working theory: the pipeline doesn't re-export/re-pull the solution from UAT when promoting to PROD. Instead, it reuses the same package/artifact that was originally exported from DEV during the DEV→UAT run, and just pushes that same artifact forward to PROD. UAT effectively acts as a validation gate rather than a build source for the next hop.

Can anyone confirm whether this "build once, promote the same artifact through every stage" behaviour is indeed how native pipelines work? Is there any official documentation that states this explicitly? We've only been using pipelines for a couple of months and want to be sure this is expected before we explain it to our team/stakeholders as correct behaviour rather than a misconfiguration.

Thanks in advance!

Hey

I'm not sure if this is the right sub for this post. If it's not, I'd really appreciate it if you could direct me to the right sub.

I'm currently a Master's student in Germany. My experience has largely been related to the MS Power Platform (PowerApps, Power Automate, Copilot Studio and Power BI), including my current Working-Student role.
I'm curious about career paths I can go into given my current experience. If I understand correctly, my skillset would be useful for MS partner organizations or any other organization/team that uses Power Platform solutions.
At Microsoft, I haven't come across any roles which requires experience with the Power Platform. The Cloud Solution Architect role requires experience with Azure or other cloud platforms. Are there any other roles where my experience could be of use?
I'll also be taking the PL-900 cert soon, followed by the newly released set of certs focused on AI.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you!

Hi All,

Need one help, i have around 1000k records of data and i want to update one choice column to No for all records. Is there any easy way to do this without hitting limits?

Exploring xrmtoolbox option but i am not really sure on how it will work.

I've been going through the latest release wave notes, and it got me thinking. Every release seems introduce dozens or hundreds of new capabilities across Power Apps, Power Automate, Copilot Studio, Dataverse, etc. But when I look at projects I've been involved in, only a handful of those features ever end up being adopted. Usually it's because teams are focused on things like:

• Reducing app maintenance
• Improving approval workflows
• Making existing apps more reliable
• Keeping governance under control
  

Everything else gets pushed to "maybe later". I'm curious how others handle this. Do you have a formal process for reviewing each release wave, or do you only look at new features when there's a business need? I'd be interested to hear how different organizations decide what's actually worth implementing.

I am a tech-minded, self-taught builder / doer / fixer.

I have previous frontline experience with a financial institution and am now an innovation developer getting my feet wet in the Power Platform world.

I know governance and security are priority mindsets, not an afterthought. I am asking this more from the technical / development side for anybody who got into Power Platform without a deep technical background:

What tools, connectors, habits, or areas of operational risk do you wish you understood earlier?

Things like environment strategy, DLP, premium connectors, service accounts, solution management, Dataverse, SharePoint permissions, ALM, Copilot Studio actions, or anything else that can quietly become a problem later.

Basically: what should a new person learn early so they can move fast without creating a mess?

Hey Guys, I am trying to build the approval work list items just like we have in powers automate section. So that users can have flexibility to approve from spfx application as well with Outlook and teams. I have able to load all action items and show case them here but I am not able to find any property to filter them based on my flow.

Can anyone help me with this. It would be really helpful. I tried data verse as well but that was a dead point. For me.

I will really appreciate your help . Thanks

We're building a Power Platform document generation solution where Word templates are populated from Dataverse. The documents are dynamic, so sections can be added, removed, or repeated, which changes the final page count.

Our biggest challenge is generating a Table of Contents (TOC) with accurate page numbers, since page numbers only exist after the document is rendered.

Options I've evaluated so far (for dynamic TOC generation):

• PDF4me – Supports dynamic TOC generation from headings. Starting at USD $35/month.
• Power2Apps – Supports dynamic TOC generation. Includes 100 converter actions/month, starting at €29/month thereafter.
• Encodian – Premium Power Automate connector. 50 free credits, then USD $499/year.
• Nutrient – 30-day trial, then starting at USD $109/month.

Kindly suggest or point me towards a direction from where I can get the answers.

TIA

Hi I noticed that there are 2 different toggles for Customer Lockbox in Power Platform and they are somewhat confusing:

• One Lockbox toggle is under manage->tenant-> Customer lockbox settings and
• One Lockbox toggle is under Security->Compliance-> Customer Lockbox.

Also noticed that these settings can have different values. e.g. Compliance lockbox setting could be on and tenant setting off. Does anyone know what these settings do?

Hey everyone,

I am just wondering how people go about getting experience with Dataverse and Dynamics 365 if you don't work in an organisation that hasn't implemented it.

I want the next stage of my career to be heavily Dynamics 365 orientated, with a secondary focus on AI (CoPilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, Local Models). Learning about the AI systems mentioned is fine because I know how to play around and build out small projects in those spaces. Dynamics 365 however is different - I want to upskill in that space, but how I go about that is unclear to me.

A bit of background about me: I've been working with Power Platform for the past 6 years, primarily with Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Bi. I am the primary Power Platform Admin in our org as well so I deal with all the administration and governance in the admin centre. I'm also the primary technical resource for our SharePoint environment and work heavily with PnP in PowerShell and SPFx for web-part development. Given my work history, I believe I have been in the current role for too long and I will be upskilling in my own time to get a new role.

In my country Dynamic 365 roles are uncommon, and when they do pop up they're always advertising for Senior Power Platform Developer or Architect or Consultant roles - Nothing in the intermediate space (that I have seen and I have been checking semi-regularly for the past 3 years).

I was hoping this lovely community could help guide me a little bit - even if it's just a starting point, because I am lost, thank you!

For those of you using Power Automate in a real business environment, how do you document governance/compliance around your flows, assuming you document it at all?

I’m trying to understand what people actually track in practice versus what sounds good on paper but never gets maintained.

For business-critical flows, do you document things like:

• Business owner / technical owner
• Flow purpose
• Data being used or modified
• Connectors used
• Environment
• Trigger type
• Approval requirements
• Risk level / business criticality
• DLP or connector policy considerations
• Error handling / notification behavior
• Dependencies
• Connection references or service accounts
• Recovery / handoff notes
• Change history
• Audit/control mapping
• Retention or privacy considerations

A few things I’m especially curious about:

1. Do you use a formal checklist/template for flows, or is documentation mostly informal?
2. What fields are actually useful during audits, handoff, support, or troubleshooting?
3. What documentation sounds important but usually becomes unnecessary overhead?
4. Does your documentation change based on risk, department, environment, connectors, or sensitive data?
5. Who is responsible for keeping this information current: the maker, IT/admins, compliance, or the business owner?
6. If you were designing a lightweight documentation template from scratch, what would you include?

I’m mainly looking for real-world experience rather than theoretical best practices. What does your organization actually do, and what has or has not worked?

I want to know if there is any future scope in this field, in the microsoft power platform ecosystem, like if have to switch after few years will it be easy for me, and what about the salary increment. In training i learnt about SharePoint, power apps, spfx and power automate.

Hi, everyone.

I hope to get some guidance. I have been working as continous improvement analyst and power platform developer for 5 years. Never with the official title of Power Platform Developer but delivering solutions through Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Bi, etc.

I am currently in the process to get a Power Platform Developer Position. They scheduled a technical interview with an enviroment that contains, power apps, power automate and power pages.

My question for the comunity is: what kind of tests could they ask to perform or... has anyone of you had gone through a similar process?

I have heard of this for other kind of developers, mostly fullstack, but never for this. I feel very nervous because I don't know formulas by heart, I have many golsaries I have made for myself but I hardly remember every formula without consulting my own notes.

Can anyone here share guidance or wisdom with me?

Low-code makes it easy to build apps, but how is your team keeping Shadow IT under control?

Is there a publicly available PowerShell module that provides helpful Power Platform governance tools and runs Pac CLI under the hood? (Or anything under the hood, but preferably Pac CLI)

Some examples of "helpful Power Platform governance tools":

• Given its GUID, get an environment, environment group, or DLP policy
• Create an environment, make it managed, and move it to an environment group
• Clone a DLP policy
• Given a DLP policy, get its business, non-business, and blocked connectors
• Given a DLP policy and a connector, get which of that connector's actions are allowed in that DLP policy
• Given an environment group, get its published rules in human-readable format

Hi team, I am building a Copilot Studio Full agent and one of my needs is to incorporate a function to automatically schedule a call with an end user that it’s saving to in a previous step.

The idea was originally to use Get Calendars or use one the incorporates connectors which will suggest free times the end user is available but I was having issues with that because rather than coming back with hard set timeframes, it was guessing and potentially returning slots where the user would be off shift or otherwise show unavailable in free busy.

So the idea came that instead of doing that, why not leverage Bookings and sent the end user a link to your Booking page. I realize this would need to be setup first by the user interacting with the agent but I quickly realized Bookings pages are not something you can construct. Example: Domain.booking.com/upn and instead has a unique id in the url but I have found no way to construct or dynamically build the bookings page so that it can be used when constructing the teams message that it will then send.

Any ideas or has anyone played with Bookings?

Thanks