Power Pizza: Icons and Tool Tips

We are in the middle of a Power Pizza Blog Series! I am walking through lessons learned while building a Power App to track your Pizza Crawls. This will allow your friends to submit their locations, enter ratings and view the winner. Finally, a scientific solution for finding the best pizza!

Changing Icons

One of the cool things I learned while working on the Power Pizza app was how you can change your button icons pretty quickly.

When you start your app from data, you have the gallery and several forms created. These all have icons across the top for things like submit, back, reorder, etc. In my case, not all of these icons made sense.

If you select this icon, then you will see in the properties that you can easily change it to something else. I used this to replace some unnecessary icons with a home to quickly get back to my main screen.

Tool Tips

Keep in mind that just because you have changed the icon, the other actions have not updated. It does not magically know what you want to do (yet?). So you need to update the associated actions and tool tips.

In the Power Pizza app, I got very excited about changing these buttons and made several changes then copied them over to other forms, etc. Then my primary tester (the husband) asked me why my Home button said “Cancel”. Let this be your warning to update your Tool Tips before you start copying your buttons!

This Tool Tip property is also part of the Properties when you have the icon selected. Keep in mind this is only visible when using the app from a computer but that does not make it less important.

Best Practices

When editing Icons you should:

• Change the Icon to fit your need
• Update the Navigation or action (OnSelect) to match
• Update the Tool Tip to match
• Update the name of the icon to keep things organized and accessible

Bonus tip: Also be careful as you move or delete icons on your automatically generated pages. Some of the labels are tied to icon placement. I noticed this when removing an icon and then I would get formula errors on another field. To resolve you can manually resize that field to break the link with the buttons or (the better professional way) update the X and Y values with other relative locations.

Keep listening for even more lessons learned tomorrow!