What is Formula columns ?

The official announcement of the public preview of formula columns in Dataverse was made on September 15, 2021 and was released in general availability in late 2023.

Formula columns are columns that display a calculated value in a Microsoft Dataverse table. Formulas use Power Fx, a powerful but human-friendly programming language. Build a formula in a Dataverse formula column the same way you would build a formula in Microsoft Excel. As you type, Intellisense suggests functions and syntax, and even helps you fix errors.

Formula columns will eventually replace the classic calculated columns feature. You can find an interesting benchmark between calculated field and formula column here.

Create a formula column

1. Sign in to Power Apps at https://make.powerapps.com
2. Create a new column with Data type = fx Formula
3. Enter your formula in the formula box and save
   1. The formula that you enter determines the column type. You can't change a column type after the column is created. That means you can change the formula after you've created the column only if it doesn't change the column type.

Coming features

New capabilities

Some enhancements will be done to address calculated columns capabilities that aren't currently supported inside the formula columns.

Here are some of the known gaps that formula columns don't support today:

• Creation of currency columns.
• Creation of whole numbers.
• Support for choice columns.
• Ability to change labels for choice columns (other than Yes/No).
• Number of formula columns at the table level.
• Support for floating fields.

Get formula suggestions (preview)

Formula suggestions accepts your natural language input to interpret and suggest a Power Fx formula using GPT-based AI model.

To enabled this feature you must enable the AI suggestions for formula columns environment setting.