If you follow my YouTube channel at all, you’ve probably noticed that I have spent some time paying around with the new express design for Power Apps that was announced on May 24, 2022.

First: The Announcement, Initial Excitement & Failures

First, on May 25th, I dove in and recorded myself test driving this exciting new functionality!

I was so excited to read this release, announced at Microsoft Build on May 24, 2022. I drew an app on a piece of paper! Excitement was high!! And then….

An unexpected error has occurred. With no details.

So I drew another picture! A better picture! And then….

An unexpected error has occurred.

I posted this video and shared it on my social media networks. On LinkedIn, some super awesome helpful Microsoft employees put me in touch with some of the people who made this new feature! We exchanged a few emails and scheduled a live troubleshooting call for the next week.

Second: Live Troubleshooting with TEAM AWESOME!

Microsoft assembled “Team Awesome” to jump on a call with me to debug these errors I was receiving through the express design process. And we found the issue!! It is the image size!!

When I took a photo with my phone, it was a high-resolution photo (aka HUGE in size!). Team Awesome noticed in our live debugging session that it was 9.9 MB in size, but there’s an unpublished rule that says your image needs to be 4MB or less for express design to work! VOILA!! Team Awesome, you’re awesome!

Third: Live, uncut walkthrough of Express Design using a <4MB Image

Which brings us to the final segment in my deep dive into Express design with Power Apps – a live build with Kylie Kiser! In the video below, we build a new table in Dataverse to accompany our app. If we skipped that step, this whole thing would have taken about 5 minutes.