Power Apps: Tabbed Gallery for Speakers

Key insights

• Tabbed Filters & Speaker Management: Build a modern gallery that uses tabs to filter speaker records by status, category, or department.
  Tabs make it easy for admins to view groups like All, Confirmed, Pending, or Cancelled at a glance.
• Modern Controls & TabList/Horizontal Gallery: Turn on modern controls in app settings and use a horizontal gallery or TabList as the tab row.
  Place modern buttons or badges inside each tab to show labels and counts.
• Filter() & SharePoint: Connect a vertical gallery to your data source (for example, a SharePoint list of speakers).
  Use a filter such as Filter(Speakers, Status = TabGallery.Selected.Value || TabGallery.Selected.Value = "All") to show matching records.
• Dynamic Filtering & Selected.Value: Update the selected tab with an OnSelect action (for example, Set(varSelectedTab, ThisItem.Value)) so the gallery refreshes automatically.
  Generate tabs from data to avoid hardcoding and to reflect new statuses immediately.
• Responsive Design & Conditional Formatting: Use containers and flexible layouts so the gallery works on phones and tablets.
  Highlight the active tab with conditional fills and show counts using CountRows(Filter(...)) for clarity.
• Scalability & Performance: Tabs improve navigation and reduce clicks for large event lists.
  Follow best practices: limit data returned, delegate where possible, and test on real devices to keep the app fast and reliable.

Video Snapshot: What Microsoft Demonstrated

Microsoft published a demo video presented by Shiv Sharma that shows how to build a modern gallery with tabbed filters in Power Apps for speaker management. The short walkthrough focuses on practical UI patterns, using modern controls, and connecting a gallery to a list of speakers so administrators can quickly filter by status such as "All," "Confirmed," or "Pending." Furthermore, the demo emphasizes responsive layouts and visual cues that make a management dashboard easier to scan.

As a result, viewers get a step-by-step look at inserting a horizontal tab control, wiring it to a vertical data gallery, and adding dynamic counts and conditional formatting. The video is framed as a community demo and aims to help developers and citizen-builders adopt cleaner, more scalable app designs. Thus, the presentation balances practical guidance with examples that can be adapted to event apps and dashboards.

How the Tabbed Gallery Works

At the core of the demo is a horizontal tab bar built with a TabList or a blank horizontal gallery that drives filtering of a vertical gallery below. For instance, selecting a tab sets a variable and then updates the vertical gallery's items using a Filter expression so only matching speakers appear. Additionally, the approach uses theme-aware fills and modern buttons to highlight the active tab and show item counts, which improves the user experience for administrators.

Moreover, the demo favors generating tabs from data where possible, so new statuses appear without hardcoding and the UI stays in sync with the underlying data. To speed user interactions, the presenter shows how to use collections to cache data locally, reducing round trips to the backend while keeping the app responsive. Consequently, the result looks like a compact dashboard that works well on tablets and phones.

Implementation Steps and Practical Tips

The demo walks through enabling modern controls in app settings, inserting the tab gallery, and connecting the data gallery to a SharePoint list that stores speakers' names, bios, and statuses. Then the presenter demonstrates setting the gallery's Items property to a filter expression that respects the selected tab, and adding counts with a formula such as a row-count for each status. In addition, flexible containers and responsive design settings help the layout adapt to different screen sizes.

Furthermore, the video shows how to make tabs data-driven so administrators don't need to update the UI when new statuses are introduced. The tutorial also recommends conditional formatting for selected states and badges for counts, which increase clarity without adding clutter. Therefore, builders can recreate this pattern for other list-driven apps such as volunteer rosters or registrant lists.

Benefits, Tradeoffs, and Performance Considerations

Tabbed galleries bring clear usability gains by exposing filters visually and reducing the number of clicks to see relevant records, which is especially helpful in fast-paced event operations. However, there are tradeoffs: adding rich visual elements and local caching improves perceived performance but increases complexity in state management and requires extra work to keep cache logic correct. Thus, teams must balance polished UI with maintainable logic.

In addition, using SharePoint as a backend is convenient for many organizations, but it introduces delegation limits when datasets grow large, which can affect the accuracy of filtered results. Consequently, the demo suggests caching with collections for smaller datasets and considering premium sources like Dataverse for larger scales. Therefore, designers must weigh cost, scale, and app responsiveness when choosing a data strategy.

Challenges, Accessibility, and Best Practices

Beyond design choices, the demo highlights practical challenges such as handling delegation, ensuring mobile responsiveness, and keeping the app accessible for keyboard and screen reader users. For example, dynamic tabs simplify the UI but require careful error handling when the underlying data changes or when users have intermittent connectivity. Moreover, maintaining clear focus states and readable contrasts is essential to meet accessibility goals.

To address these challenges, the presenter recommends using theme-aware modern controls, testing with representative datasets, and documenting caching behavior so future maintainers understand when and why collections are refreshed. Finally, for production apps, builders should monitor performance, test common user flows, and choose a data source that aligns with their expected volume and governance policies.

Overall, the Microsoft demo offers a practical template for modernizing Power Apps galleries with tabbed filters while candidly showing the tradeoffs involved. By following the demo’s patterns and minding the limitations around data delegation and complexity, teams can create efficient, user-friendly admin dashboards for speaker management and similar use cases.

Keywords

Power Apps gallery tutorial, tabbed filters Power Apps, speaker management app Power Apps, modern Power Apps gallery design, filterable gallery Power Apps, Power Platform speaker management, Power Apps tabs component, build Power Apps gallery