This release is focused on that foundation. It’s part of a broader pace of investment in canvas apps that also includes Card control, Confirm() for canvas apps, and copy and paste themes. In the coming weeks, we’ll share more about the future of canvas apps and upcoming investments — including AI. Today’s focus is quality updates to nine modern controls: Text, Number Input, Date Picker, Text Input, Tab List, Combo Box, Radio, Link, and Info Button.

What’s updated and why

Modern controls are the foundation of the canvas app experience we’re building toward. For that foundation to hold up — in production apps, across mobile and desktop — it needs to be reliable, performant, and consistent with the Power Fx patterns makers already know. These updates close the gaps that surfaced through real-world use across these controls.

Combo Box

The Combo Box is the primary way users make selections in most canvas apps, and this update addresses several areas where it was falling short.

The previous version had a practical item limit of around 800 records when bound to a data source — a constraint that forced workarounds in many real-world apps. The updated control handles several thousand items directly. For very large datasets, the SearchText output property enables server-side filtering so the control can work with data at any scale.

Beyond data scale, this update addresses selection behavior and form reliability. Selections can now be cleared by clicking a selected item — the control now behaves the way makers expected from the start. Many-to-One Dataverse relationships work correctly, opening up relational data patterns that weren’t reliably possible before. Inside forms, the control holds its value through SubmitForm() and resets cleanly when Reset() is called. SelectMultiple now defaults to `true`, reflecting how the control is most commonly used.

Learn more on Combo Box updates →

Date Picker

The Date Picker updates center on two themes: view-mode correctness and reliability in dynamic layouts. When DisplayMode is set to `View`, the control now renders as read-only rather than remaining editable. In galleries and in screens with navigation, date values now persist correctly. Date format and timezone settings are honored consistently. The calendar flyout is also correctly sized on mobile devices.

Learn more on Date Picker updates →

Text Input

The central update to Text Input is OnChange timing. The event now fires when the user leaves the field, not on every keystroke. This removes a class of performance issues and unintended formula side effects that were common in form-based apps — and it’s one of the most frequently raised pieces of feedback for this control. TriggerOutput now defaults to OnKeypress so the output value updates as the user types, which is the behavior most makers expected. For Text Input controls inside a form, TriggerOutput defaults to Delayed. DisplayMode.View now renders as genuinely read-only.

Learn more on Text Input updates →

Text

The Text control gains OnSelect, making it possible to trigger actions when a user selects text — for navigation, expandable content, or similar patterns — without needing a separate Button control. AutoHeight now recalculates correctly in dynamic layouts where a control is hidden and shown again. The default vertical alignment is now Middle.

Learn more on Text updates →

Number Input

Number Input now matches Text Input in styling coverage — Font Color, font weight, and property panel organization are all consistent across the two controls. OnChange behavior aligns as well: the event fires on blur and on step button clicks. The control also now enforces that Min cannot exceed Max, removing a class of configuration errors that previously only surfaced at runtime.

Learn more on Number Input updates →

Tab List

A new Appearance property — with Transparent, Subtle, Underline, and Filled options — gives makers direct control over the visual style of the tab strip, covering the most common design patterns without custom workarounds. The Tab List also previously reordered items silently; it now preserves the order you define.

Learn more on Tab List updates →

Radio

The Radio control now behaves consistently in the scenarios makers use it in most. Item order is preserved. DisplayMode.View renders as read-only rather than disabled. The control works correctly inside galleries — registering a selection no longer requires a double-click.

Learn more on Radio updates →

Link

The Link control now behaves as expected in the authoring experience. Wrap correctly controls text wrapping, and Alt+Click in the editor opens the link — consistent with how classic controls behave.

Learn more on Link updates →

Info Button

The content flyout now opens and expands correctly. Click reliability is improved. The AcceptsFocus property has been removed — the control now manages focus behavior automatically for accessibility.

Learn more on Info Button updates →

Improvements across all controls

A few changes apply across all nine controls updated in this release. Mobile-optimized defaults — larger touch targets and appropriately scaled font sizes — now apply automatically when a control is added to a mobile-format canvas. Property naming is consistent across all controls. And the command bar and right-click menus in Power Apps Studio now surface the most-used style properties — font, size, color, and alignment — directly, without opening the full property panel.

Updating your apps

If your app uses a previous version of any of these controls, you’ll see an update notification on the control in Power Apps Studio. Select Learn more on the notification to review the update guide for that control. An inline Update button will be available to all makers in a follow-up release to update previous versions of these controls.

For a full summary of changes across these controls, see the modern controls update overview.

What’s next

In the coming weeks, we’ll share more about the future of canvas apps and upcoming investments — including AI.
Our investment in modern controls continues. We’re working on new Fluent templates to give makers a polished, ready to-use starting point when building canvas apps. We’re also adding new controls to expand what’s available out of the box. And the quality work isn’t stopping here — we’re continuing bug fixes and improvements across the remaining modern controls, including Form, Dropdown, and Gallery, which weren’t part of this update.

The post New quality updates to modern controls in canvas apps appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Since last update in early April, we have continued making critical leaps to enable our app creators to build truly modern apps. We have many exciting announcements – Updates to modern theming, availability of icon in buttons, more controls in generally available state and ~100 new styling properties across modern controls. These updates are live in preview and will roll out to more regions as per our deployment schedule. Let us dive into details. 

1. Updates to modern theming 
   • Classic controls – Modern theming now applies to more than just modern controls. When you select a modern theme, it also gets applied to classic controls through PowerFx formulas that utilize modern theme variables to set the color properties of classic controls. This allows you to create an app with a more consistent appearance with the click of a single button. And, if you do not like how the modern theme was applied to your app, no problem! You can easily undo the changes by clicking the Undo button once to revert the changes to the classic controls, and a second time to revert the application of the theme to your modern controls.Theme applied on classic control
   • Vibrancy and Torsion adjustments – When creating or editing custom themes, you can now utilize the Vibrancy and Torsion sliders to adjust the theme palette generated from the seed color you select, especially the colors at the lighter end of the palette. Vibrancy affects how muted or bright the palette is, and Torsion impacts the tint of the color. You can use these sliders to fine-tune your theme.
     
     Torsion and vibrancy options in theme
   • Theme preview – We have also added a theme preview in the “Create a theme” dialog. This preview shows you how the theme would be applied to various example controls, such as buttons, labels, and input fields. Use the preview to see the effects of your theme choices before you apply them to your app, and experiment with different options until you find the perfect one.
     
     Preview of theme on controls
2. Icons in button control
   We have enhanced our button control to display fluent icons. Makers have the option to configure icon to render on left, right or render only icon with no text in button. Makers can render icon in outline or filled state. Makers can also rotate icon within a button.Examples for icon in button
3. More controls are generally available
   • Checkbox – We have taken feedback from our app creators and along with more styling options, we have now provided granular control over checkbox size. With this update, this control is now generally available.Different sizes for checkbox
   • Radio – Similar to checkbox, we also have now provided configuration to update radio button size along with additional style properties making this control generally available for our customers.
   • Badge – We added the last few remaining align properties making this control generally available. Many app creators want to use badge as buttons, but we recommend using button control for accessibility and we have now also provided more customization to button for the same as described more in styling section below.
4. New styling properties on modern controls
   We have started rolling out critical styling properties on controls mentioned below. There will be another major update in a few weeks for more styling properties (refer to upcoming section).
   1. Alignment properties: Controls like number input, text input, button and badge have now both vertical and horizontal alignment capabilities.
   2. Padding properties: Majority of modern controls (like text, button, all input controls, checkbox, radio, and link) have now padding properties available.
   3. Appearance property for input controls: Now all input controls have appearance options available to update the desired visual treatment:
      
      Different appearance properties for input controlsIn long term, this property will also be available at form and theme level, so that makers can set desired style quickly for the whole app.
   4. Border radius: We have made granular border radius property available on button control like left top, right top, left bottom and right bottom radius properties. For all input controls, we have intentionally kept our experience simple and have provided one single radius value for the control to follow with a new property called “BorderRadius”. 
      
      Example of border radius
      (PS: Please note that we are rolling back other border properties for few weeks to stabilize them better and re-enable it soon.) 

Upcoming enhancements to modern controls and theming: 

Our team is hard at work to bring you more goodness to help our app creators build modern apps. Some of the critical investments which will be rolling out in another few weeks are: 

1. Styling updates to modern controls – We are adding more critical customization properties to modern controls: 

• Fill – This property will be available to add or edit background color of all input controls, text control and more. 
• Additional border properties – Border color, style, thickness, and radius properties available to all applicable controls including input controls. For some app creators, these border properties were already rolled out, but we are currently rolling them back and will be releasing them again in a few weeks with better stabilization of the feature.

As always, we are very thankful to our amazing community who consistently provide us with feedback! The feedback is the primary source of these improvements to modern controls and theming capabilities, and we hope to continuously work on this with you all. 

The post May 2024 updates for modern controls and theming appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

As we enter the new year, let’s take a moment to reflect on our 2023 modernization journey in canvas apps and provide a glimpse of what is to come soon in 2024. In this blog, we’ll delve into the highlights, from the initial introduction of modern controls in April, through their continuous progress up to the recent GA announcements, and finally to the innovations coming in early 2024.

2023 recap of modern controls

In 2023, Microsoft made substantial strides in modernizing Power Apps, focusing on controls and theming to enhance the app-building experience. The year was marked by continuous updates, new control releases, and improvements in usability and customization.

We started by launching 13 modern controls based on Microsoft Fluent 2 in preview. These controls were built for performance, ensuring fast and fluid app experiences with accessibility also as a key focus. Our makers started providing direct feedback through thumbs up/down on controls to Microsoft. Across next few weeks, we updated the canvas studio experience, added new controls, and started shipping numerous property improvements based on maker feedback to address the core usability of these controls.

In July, we released a new theming system for modern controls with PFx support. It allows the makers to change the look and feel of apps built with modern controls with greater ease and flexibility while also enabling classic to consume theme tokens. We recently added SharePoint and Teams themes to the set of available modern themes.

Another key pillar for modern controls is composite controls. Composite controls are easy to configure new responsive controls designed to reduce app complexity and improve performance. By September, we released multiple out-of-box responsive composite controls – Table, Header and Form as part of modern controls.

Recently, we also announced general availability of five modern controls – Button, Link, Slider, Tab list and Progress Bar. This list is based on high satisfaction reported by makers and critical feedback addressed on these controls. With this update, we will also be now providing full supportability to generally available modern controls to our customers.

We made critical strides for styling of modern controls. We first released the “Base palette color” property on modern controls to detach from app theme and have a different color theme on individual control. In last two months – November and December’23, we added all the expected typography properties (font color, font, font weight, and font style) to the modern controls.

Since, October updates were the last one of this series, below is the summary of recent updates in Nov and Dec’23:

• Table – We released following important improvements:
  • More configuration options – Makers can control the visibility of the footer, column headers, and the avatar (for the list view). They can also enable users to sort the data in the Table using the column headers directly.
  • Header style properties – Makers can style the Table header with much more flexibility. We added header font, font size, font color, and font weight properties.
• Tab list – For large set of options in tabs, the flyout will dynamically adjust according to position of the control.
• Info button – Introduction of line break support.
• Text – Fixed alignment and wrap issues.
• Link – Added a tooltip for the link to be displayed to app users.
• Updated settings – We also moved the opt-in setting of modern controls from the Upcoming section into the General section in the app settings in studio.

The progress made in 2023 across controls and theming in Power Apps reflects a commitment to providing makers with a modern, customizable, and accessible app-building experience. It also highlights Microsoft’s responsiveness to user feedback and its dedication to staying at the forefront of low-code application development.

Upcoming updates in 2024

Now we turn our attention to the early months of 2024, where we will be building upon the foundation laid in the previous year. Our customers and makers can expect the following updates to be released in the first few months of 2024:

• Core controls – We will be introducing the following new features to our core controls. First, built-in label and required properties will be added to input controls like Text input, Combo box, Dropdown and more. We expect this to reduce app building time for makers by significantly reducing the number of controls needed by an app. We will also be introducing more styling properties on controls, including Fill, Padding, Align, and Border related properties. Finally, we will also be releasing Fluent icons as a new control as well as an integrated feature in modern controls like Button.
• Composite controls (or building blocks) – In continuation of our strategy of releasing high-value responsive composed controls, we have two new controls in the pipeline – Dialog and Toolbar. We will also continue improving our existing composed controls of Header, Form, and Table.
• Updates to modern theming – We’ve heard your feedback on needing custom themes, and we’re working on providing the first iteration of in-app custom themes soon. After that becomes available, we will be evolving custom theming over time to add more capabilities.
• Transition of existing controls to general availability – Our team is working hard to ensure that all the remaining preview controls are ready for prime time. We are addressing the critical gaps required to transition these controls to general availability.

We hope that this glimpse into 2024 excites you as much as it does us. In expressing our gratitude, we acknowledge and appreciate the role of our customers, makers, and community in this ongoing journey, and we continue to welcome your feedback to help drive this journey. Thank you all! Here’s to a year filled with continued innovation and progress in the modernization journey of Power Apps.

The post Recap of modern controls evolution in 2023 and a glimpse into 2024 innovations appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In October’23, we continued enhancing modern controls and theming and delivered some key enhancements as mentioned in this blog, which is rolling out to our customers at the time of publish. Our ongoing investments spans across improving existing controls, improving theming, and adding new controls to be used by makers.

A step ahead – general availability of some modern controls in canvas apps

Many of Power Apps customers have already started adopting these controls at scale. To support them in their journey, we have now started transitioning controls from preview to general availability starting Nov 13^th. The first set of controls are – Button, Link, Slider, Tab list and Progress Bar. This list is based on high satisfaction reported by makers and critical feedback addressed on these controls. In coming weeks, we will continue to add more customization capabilities like font color, background color, padding and more – on all controls. With this update, we will also be now providing full supportability to generally available modern controls to our customers.

We will continue this momentum and soon transition more controls (including the input controls) to general availability by early January. The remaining controls will be moved to the GA stage individually on a week-by-week basis.

Despite moving some controls to GA, modern controls and theming will continue to be an opt-in feature until the end of this year. We will, however, be moving the opt-in setting from upcoming features panel to general tab in settings by end of 2023 and will be turning modern controls on by default progressively for new apps in the next year, as we continue addressing reported gaps and adding new capabilities to these controls for our makers.

Enhancements to modern controls & theming

Below are the updates made to controls in the last month:

• Font size and color property: In an effort to extend customization capabilities on controls, we added the capability to update the base palette color and font size on controls. It provides our makers capability to customize the color and font size of text within a control. These properties provide makers the ability to customize the font size of text within a control and the color palette used to style the control. This update will be followed by adding more font-related and visual customizations in coming month(s).
  

• Improvements to controls for general availability: We enhanced Button, Link, Slider, Tab list and Progress bar as following:
  1. We updated the controls to provide right output properties.
  2. All accessibility issues have been fixed and controls are ready for prime time.
  3. Overflow menu and padding to tab and button are now optimized to have the best experience for our end users.
  4. We are setting better defaults and sample data for all controls.
     
• Introducing field validations: Field validations represent a significant improvement for managing error conditions in input controls in Power Apps. This is done through a new property we introduced called – ValidationState – that is applicable for all input controls. This property has two states – None, Error, with controls in an error validation state showing red borders.
  
  Makers can leverage this property using PowerFx to write advanced scenarios for error handling and can also describe patch rules based on the value in this property. The new form control also now uses this property for error handling by default!

• Table control: The Table control now supports more connectors, including Excel, SQL, and SharePoint connectors. With this update, we have removed the limitation of only supporting the Dataverse connector. We have also fixed the issue where ids were showing choice type columns for Dataverse tables.
  

• Form control: We have updated the current form control in preview to now support combo box for choice type and multi-select scenarios out of the box. We also fixed the title issues in the horizontal layout of the form by introducing right truncation patterns.
  
• Theme pane accessibility: As we continue attracting new Power Apps makers in huge numbers, we have addressed the remaining accessibility issues for the Themes pane.

Upcoming enhancements to modern controls and theming:

We are currently working on few exciting updates and will be released in few weeks:

• Font properties on all applicable controls: You will soon be able to customize font, font color, font weight and font style on all modern controls.
  
• More customization options on text control: We are in process of updating text control to also support background color and padding for our makers to use these controls effectively.
  
• Table control: We are introducing additional customization properties on table control:
  • Show Avatar: You will soon be able to show and hide avatars in your list view of the table control.
  • Show Footer: You will soon be able to show and hide footers in your table visual.
  • Show column headers: You will soon be able to show and hide column headers in your table visuals based on the scenario makers want table to achieve.

• New color picker for base palette color: Since the BasePaletteColor property generates a new color ramp that is applied to a modern control (and not a single-color selection), we are updating the color picker to better communicate the selection of a set of colors rather than an individual color.

• Modern controls and theming will be default on in preview: Before end of this year, all new apps built in make.preview.powerapps.com (and in preview environment), will have modern controls enabled by default as a control set. The opt-in setting will still be part of general tab and can be switched off, if required.
  
• Fluent icons: Makers will be able to add standalone icons. Makers will also be able to add an icon on the button.

We sincerely thank our community and makers for continuing to provide us feedback and help us build these capabilities. We will continue to ship updates to improve our controls and theming in response to the feedback we receive from you all.

The post October updates for modernization in canvas apps (includes GA of few modern controls) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We thank our community and users for the active engagement on the journey to modernize Power Apps. This blog outlines the modernization updates we rolled out or are rolling out on both canvas and model apps.

Modern controls updates in canvas apps

We recently released the following improvements for modern controls:

• New insert pane design for modern controls: We have established concept of modern & classic controls for fluent based vs current controls – a paradigm which will be used frequently as we progress towards canvas modernization. The same is now reflected in how our makers will use controls in studio. After enabling modern controls, if you open insert pane, you will see a new tab with all modern controls in it.
  

• Key control improvements: We are constantly shipping additional properties while also modifying existing properties based on your feedback. Here are the latest updates about the changes published in May:

We have many more updates exciting updates coming to control properties to enhance functionality as well as align on best practices for the control to be used by makers.

• Improved property reference & Enums:
  • We have simplified property references for modern controls. Earlier, the properties had long reference in format
    PowerApps.CoreControls.<Control name>.<Property name>.<Value>.
    The new format is <Control name>.<Property name>.<Value> to increase usability of these controls.
  • Earlier, many enum based properties were incorrectly represented as ‘strings’ confusing makers about the type of property. But we updated our infrastructure to correctly represent those values, now making it easy for our makers to manipulate them correctly.
    
• No more extra step for arrays to work on dataset based controls: We have removed the PCF limitation to select the default ‘value’ field in order to make dataset based controls work while providing an array as input. This increases usability and steps to configure key existing controls like tab list, radio button & dropdown, and also for upcoming controls like breadcrumb & combobox. Our makers can now directly add list of items in control and control will work as expected.
  

Visual improvements in model apps

We’ve also been improving our model driven app modern experiences. In May we’ve released the following updates to our modern apps preview.

• Dialogs: Dialogs now flow to the height of their content, reducing white space for small dialogs. The buttons and icons have also been modernized.

• Loading indicators: We’ve modernized loading indicators in the header and form. Loading spinners within the app have also been modernized.

What is next?

We will soon be making new theming available, initially for canvas apps and then subsequently model apps. The announcement will follow dedicated blog post later. We will also release new controls soon – Combobox, Toggle, Slider & Breadcrumb. And as mentioned above, we will continuously update property sets and enhance functionality of existing controls to make them production ready. We are releasing improvements each week. We will add the release notes link in the comments below.

For model apps, we are working towards modernizing remaining experiences and enabling dark mode as part of upcoming general availability. We will provide more details in the next blog post.

The post May 2023 updates for modernization in Power Apps appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

1. Modern – A focused and less cluttered design that supports richer interaction states and elevation, provides a higher usability baseline to build your low code apps from. These controls are based on Microsoft’s own Fluent design system which powers majority of Microsoft experiences across all products like Microsoft Teams, Word and more.

2. Fast – Built for performance. We are making critical investments for this new suite to ensure your apps are fast and fluid. 
   
3. Accessible – These controls are WCAG 2.1 compliant with accessibility built in by default. We will provide a comprehensive set of properties for our developers to configure. 

4. Theming – Designed with theming in mind. Although not part of the initial launch, support for theming and per control styling is coming to the preview soon. 

Here is a look at side by side comparison for the same app on new vs classic controls:

The preview will be updated frequently over the next few months. The goal is to provide a full suite of modern controls that are easy to style and fast. There are 13 new controls in the initial release. 

We are far from done though.  There are several awesome capabilities that we are going to be bringing over the coming weeks: 

1. Per control styling – color and font support that will work with the new theming system. 

2. New theming system – We are introducing a new theming system that will allow you to customize the look and feel of apps with greater ease and flexibility.  

3. More controls – Lots more controls are on the way. There will be more atomic elements like toggle, breadcrumb, and multi-select dropdown, as well as updated form, gallery, and new composed controls. 

4. Improved authoring & controls experience – We are making enhancements to the authoring experience, to make it much quicker and easier to build apps.

How to enable this feature?

Power Apps developers can turn on modern controls feature in Power Apps Studio by navigating to list of preview features in settings dialog.

After turning the feature on, developers can view the list of controls on insert pane in left panel.

To learn more about modern controls, please see – Overview of modern controls. 

If you have any questions or feedback about the model controls for canvas apps, please reach out to us. You can provide feedback to improve controls within Power Apps Studio or use community forum to discuss with us and more community members. 

The post Modern controls coming to canvas apps appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We aim for Power Apps to be synonymous with highest quality apps built at enterprise scale. As a further step to this goal, we are enabling makers and organization administrators to view the app ratings and comments provided by app users. The feature is currently available only for model-driven apps as part of public preview.

The mechanism to capture feedback for the apps is completely managed by Microsoft and is compliant with all international privacy and security standards. The feedback is processed to generate satisfaction score of an app on a scale of 0 to 200 which is displayed to makers for their apps.

In addition to app satisfaction score and trends, the feature also provides list of all comments provided by end users which makers and administrators can sort by satisfaction scale. The feature also provides integration with actions to improve your apps – Solution Checker, Performance Insights, Live Monitor and usability recommendations.

To know more, please refer to our documentation.

Please also provide your feedback on this feature here.

The post Review feedback and ratings from your users to improve your apps appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.