- Hello, I'm Matthew from the Power Apps Team.
And I'm here to demo for you custom help panes
and guided tasks for unified interface.
We recently blogged about this feature back in November.
If you're interested in learning more about this feature,
definitely check out our blog, and for more details
check out the custom help pane doc article
by following the link at the bottom.
On the doc article, it will show you all the information
I'm about to show you in the video.
Including how to enable custom help panes
for your environment, and how to author
your own custom help panes.
But without further ado, let's actually check out
what it's like to create and author
your own custom help panes.
To do that, I already have a model driven app set up
that shows a list of components
that we on the Power Apps Team use to build Power Apps.
Now if I'm a new user to the team, and I come to this page,
it might not be clear what I'm supposed to do here.
So what I've done is enabled custom help panes
in this environment, so that if I click
on the help button,
a pane appears that shows just the content that I need
to get my job done.
I have text showing me what a component is
along with an image.
I have optional sections that can expand and collapse
that provide additional help content.
I have a video that I could watch to learn more,
and I even have a link that shows me where the new button is
if I'm not sure where it is on a page.
Now If I want to edit this content
or add new content, all I have to do
is click on the dot-dot-dot button in the top right.
Clicking on this will show an edit button
which after you select, will allow you to enter
the WYSIWYG mode.
In the WYSIWYG mode, you can instantly
start typing additional content,
like, "to refresh the list if it goes stale,
"select the refresh button."
If I had a more involved set of steps,
I could use a bulleted list, a numbered list.
And if I wanted to bold or italicize information,
those actions are available to me as well.
Lastly, there are all the elements that you can use
under the insert tab.
We've already seen a few of them.
For example, Sections, which are these
expand and collapse areas,
Images, Videos, and even Links.
If I want to change out this image,
all I have to do is delete it,
select the insert image button,
find myself an image,
copy its URL, paste it in,
and then give it a title.
We'll go ahead and call it "Component."
And you can see, after I click on the insert button,
it's placed directly where my cursor was.
The component that I like the most, however,
is the balloon.
To use the balloon, simply select the text
that you want to treat as a link,
select the insert balloon button,
and drag this element to where you want
the balloon to appear.
In my case, I wanna use it on the refresh button.
I'll go ahead and give it a title, "Refresh Button,"
and some details, "Clicking on the refresh button
"will refresh the list."
After clicking insert, we see we now have a link
and if we save and click on the button,
we can see our balloon giving us a title
and a brief description.
How cool is that?
Lastly, if you want to create a new help page
on a new page,
simply navigate to the page that you want
to add a custom help pane,
click on the help pane button,
and you'll notice that there is no help pane on this page.
So just like before,
click on the dot-dot-dot, select edit,
and then provide the information that you want to put there.
In this case, we're providing a help pane
for this component form.
So we'll say, "Component form help,"
and then provide a brief introduction of this form,
"Provide the required information on how to use
this component within Power Apps."
And clicking save will create this help page
in the background,
and now, whenever I come to any of the forms
and select the help button,
I'll be able to get the relevant help.
Now that we've seen how to use and edit help panes,
let's see how to enable it in your environment.
You'll want to enable it under your system settings.
To get to system settings,
click on the gear icon in the top right,
select advanced settings, and if you're an admin,
you'll have access to administration.
Under administration you'll finally be able
to find system settings,
and if you scroll about midway through,
you'll be able to find a new section
called "enable custom help panes and guided tasks."
You'll wanna make sure that it's checked to yes.
Please note that custom help panes and guided tasks
cannot be used at the same time with custom help URLs.
You'll notice that if you enable custom help
for customizable entities,
"enable custom help panes" becomes disabled.
That's because they both use
the question mark button in the top right.
Once you've enabled it,
make sure that whoever is authoring custom help panes
has the system customizer role.
This will enable the edit button
within the custom help panel.
Lastly, I'd like to show you
how to move content that you've written
in your dev environment, and move them
to your test and even production environments.
To do that, what you'll wanna do
is navigate to your list of solutions
and either create a new solution
or edit an existing one.
I already have a solution called "Custom Help"
right here, that already has a few pages inside of it.
For example, we can see that there's already
a component called "How to Use Components" inside of here.
If I want to add additional pages,
all I have to do is click on "add existing,"
and at the very bottom there's a new component
called "Help Page."
Selecting "Help Page" will show all of the help pages
that are available for me to use.
Selecting that and clicking "OK"
will bring it into my solution.
From here, it works like all other solutions.
I can export and import the solution
into any other environment.
This is how you can easily move things
from dev, test, to product.
And with that, that concludes my demo of custom help pages.
If you have any questions, please be sure
to checkout the documentation that goes
in even more detail about the various elements
of custom help pages.
Over the next few months, we'll be GA-ing Custom Help Panes
and adding additional capabilities,
like sequential guided tasks.