The Baretta

I recently built a questionnaire PowerApp for a customer.  They had a bunch of questions where the expected answers could be anything from 50-500 words. The problem was when you put too many words into a text box, it gets scroll bars. eww. I'm not against scrollbars for a whole screen, but for text boxes, yeah no. So here's what we did! Added a 'Blank Flexible Height' Gallery to the PowerApp Connected it to my Collection of questions Added a label to display the question Added a text box to collect the answers Set the following text box properties: Mode: Multiline Height:  40 * RoundUp((Len(TextInput1.Text)+0.01) / 90,0) What this does 40 - how tall the text box is each time you meet the character limit for one line 90 - How many characters it takes to move the 40px multiplier up  roundup - ensures the returned number is only ever 1 rounded number.  This means the text box grows in chunks, instead of growing with each individual character type...

What Product: Nintex Workflow & Forms for O365 Scenario: Create a custom Task Form on an 'Assign a Task' action via the ' Edit Task Form ' option Issue: Staff member does not have sufficient permission to approve task, and is instead provided with the following error message "Item does not exist. It may have been deleted by another user." Why In my case, I checked permissions on the list hosting the workflow AND the Workflow Tasks list to ensure the user had at least Contribute access on both (as per Nintex instructions here ). However the error message continued to appear.  In the end it was because of two things: On the list hosting the workflow, in ' Advanced Settings ' I had set Read Access to ' Read items that were created by the user '.  This was so staff cannot see requests submitted by their colleagues. The moment you edit the task form in Nintex Workflow, the Task Form requests data from the list item r...

On the 28th-29th April 2016, I attended the Digital Workplace Conference in Melbourne.  Here are my notes & thoughts about one of the sessions. Session:  Gather-Decide-Act: Three Business Process Case Studies That Transform Data Collection Into Inspired Action Speaker: Mike Fitzmaurice -  @MikeFitz Session Takeaways: Simple solutions using SharePoint lists and Nintex Forms to gather data easily Nintex Forms allow you to fill out forms in offline mode on a mobile device   Offline mode works like your email outbox.  It holds onto the data until there is an internet connection Mike's theory is that if you show a company how to collect data with a simple form, they will see the value of the solution & be inspired to act on building solutions for their other problems Tip: make data collection as simple as possible.  Don't build complicated forms Nintex Workflow also has the functionality to generate contract documents using the data captur...

Just a quick one after some deep thought. Thoughts on the Future: If you have to create an InfoPath Form, you should be creating it as a List Form (if possible), not a Form Library.  The reason for this is ease of upgrade now that InfoPath will not be upgraded/supported by Microsoft. If you have to create a Form Library (because you form requires repeating tables/sections): I’ve decided that InfoPath forms should NOT be published as Content Types.  The only time it would be considered OK is if the form is very generic and is being used on multiple sites.  E.g. a Help Form which could be used by multiple departments without any modification. The main issue when publishing as a Content Type is that every field you promote to be visible in SharePoint has to be created as a Site Column. This means that even for a small form, for instance, a Personnel Access Form, you’d have to create Site Columns for fields like: Room Number or Access Hours, which would only ever be ...