[pid-1]

My non tech users are still catching up with Power Query.

I sort of gave up forwarding news related to low code from MS, as every week there's something changing or being deprecated.

Moreover, every time I tried to use anything related to the Power Platform (so I could teach to others) I ended up in a world of pain. Is anyone actually using Power Apps, etc... Successfully?

[cardosof]

I too quit playing catch up with MS no code stuff - they change so much it's definitely not "fast iteration", it's "throw everything and see what sticks".

[TuringTest]

> I too quit playing catch up with MS no code stuff - they change so much

That might be different this time, though. Afaik it's the first time Microsoft releases a user-friendly reactive language as open source; all their previous tools in this field have been strictly proprietary.

Being open source, it can be maintained by its community of users without becoming abandoned, even if Microsoft loses interest in it.

[mathnmusic]

Open source != Open governance. Consider Signal as an example. It's open-source but there's no developer "community".

[coldtea]

That's probably for the better.

It has the benefits of the open source (you can inspect, and modify the code, exists forever, etc), without the downsides (design by commitee - sorry, community -, endless bikeshedding, code churn for the sake of it).

[patmorgan23]

This will probably have developer community around it. Given that any one that builds on the platform will be invested in maintaining it and the users will be somewhat technical and the businesses that adopt it will probably put some staff time towards it.

[2Gkashmiri]

SOURCE OPEN. sigh

[Chris2048]

What does this mean?

[2Gkashmiri]

source open is different from "open source". look but don't touch

[cable2600]

Sigh another language to learn. Just released but I will see recruiters asking for five years experience in it for job openings.

It is like they took the macro language of Excel into its own app.

[dgudkov]

May I suggest your non-tech users to try EasyMorph[1] (I'm the founder)? It's easier than PowerQuery (it's completely no-code) and at the same time more powerful. 80% of PowerQuery capabilities require coding. Our tool is 100% visual (and has a free edition).

[1] https://easymorph.com

[ModernMech]

Respectfully, “easier” and “more powerful” are meaning-free descriptors. How is your product easier and more powerful? If you’re going to post an ad, at least do me the courtesy of telling me something I don’t know.

[dgudkov]

I agree, brief descriptions like sound vague and empty. So let me support my claims: EasyMorph is easier for non-technical people because unlike with PowerQuery all of its functionality is available without coding. Also, EasyMorph is more powerful than PowerQuery, because it has a bigger library of available data transformations, for instance, interval merge (a join where a key value must fall in a range specified by two fields), fuzzy matching, binning, de-aggregation (breaking down a total), or replacing substrings using a lookup table.

In terms of programming, EasyMorph is basically a high-level functional programming language (but entirely visual) with immutability, pipelining, automatic parallelization and concurrency. It allows arranging loops similar to FOR..NEXT, FOR..EACH, DO..WHILE/UNTIL loops in programming languages. It has subroutines, conditional IF/THEN/ELSE branching, exceptions, mutexes, and a built-in key-value storage.

Besides that, it combines data preparation with no-code automation because it has many so called external actions for exporting to/updating databases, sending low-level HTTP requests to web APIs, performing file operations (download, rename, delete, clone, zip, unzip, etc.), running external applications, and even executing SSH commands on remote machines. The full list of capabilities is rather extensive to list in one post and can be found here: https://easymorph.com/all-integrations.html.

Finally, EasyMorph is just faster due to its in-memory columnar engine with several tiers of data compression and aggressive optimizations that leverage CPU cache. We regularly see customers that switch from PowerQuery because EasyMorph is 1-2 orders of magnitude faster.

At the same time, EasyMorph is 5 times less expensive than Alteryx and has a very generous (as our users say) time-unlimited, data volume-unlimited free edition.

We're entirely bootstrapped, profitable, and almost double our revenue every year for the last several years.

[ModernMech]

Thank you! This comment was very informative.

A couple more questions: do you have a roadmap for supporting non-windows systems? And also do you have plans for open sourcing any of your code?

[5ghlo]

I am really curious: How does this compare to Knime (quite popular in EU). I have onboarded a couple finance departments and I agree with you that the flow approach is easier for the teams.

[7952]

I run some websites that consult the public on new construction developments over a few weeks. We use Power Automate to route comments and bookings from a form into email, notifications, MS Teams, calendars and spreadsheets. It avoids needing a formal platform that users have to learn and needs to be customised. Plugging into existing communication channels (like email and chat) makes people more likely to use the service. And that is much easier with PowerAutomate than using Microsoft APIs. It is easy to add one more channels (like SMS) without lots of work. You can also tie things into a particular MS Teams site which makes authentication/security/privacy easier to deal with. I can send notifications and data to the MS Team and let someone else worry about who should have access. And at the end the Team can be deleted and the data scrubbed alongside it.

[paradice]

I use it at work together with Azure Functions. Power Apps is great for small functionalities you need for Azure resources. My latest example is a logic app that triggers an Azure DevOps release. When I trigger this logic app via HTTP I also pass some parameters that the release definition expects.

Another example I made is to get Microsoft Forms answers that users submitted straight into a SQL Server DB. You literally cannot programmatically get the answers in any other way, by design. Its either logic app component or export to XLSX.