Feline Festive Greetings: Build a Cat-Themed Holiday App with Power Apps

The holiday season is a perfect time to experiment with Power Apps features you might not use every day. Building a light‑hearted, themed app helps you practice variables, randomization, and integrating SharePoint data — while delivering a smile to your users. Whether you’re creating an internal team greeting or a customer‑facing holiday card, the same principles apply: clean data, simple controls, and a bit of festive flair.

Let’s walk through building a cat‑themed holiday greeting app for a fictional pet rescue, Paws & Whiskers Rescue. The app will display a personalized message alongside a random cat GIF, and it can cycle through greetings automatically or on demand.

Scenario and Data Setup

Your data lives in a SharePoint list named Donors. Each row holds a donor’s name, email, a custom greeting, and a link to a cat GIF. Here’s the schema we’ll use:

Add a few rows to test, using direct links to GIFs or images. Avoid links to web pages – the Image control needs a direct media file URL.

Step-by-Step Implementation

1. Create the App and Connect to Data

From Power Apps Studio, create a Tablet‑sized blank app. Add the Donors SharePoint list as a data source (Add data > SharePoint).

2. Build the Greeting Screen

Rename the screen to GreetingScreen. Add these controls:

• Image – will show the cat GIF. Set its X and Y to center it.
• Label – for the donor’s name.
• Label – for the greeting message.
• Button – with text “Purr‑next” to manually advance.
• Timer (optional) – to cycle automatically.

Set the screen’s Fill property to a festive holiday colour (e.g. RGBA(200, 230, 255, 1)).

Right‑click the screen and add a global variable to hold the current donor:

Set(CurrentDonor, First(Shuffle(Donors)))

For the button’s OnSelect, use the same expression so it picks a new random donor.

3. Wire the Controls

• Image.Image = CurrentDonor.CatImageURL
• NameLabel.Text = CurrentDonor.Title
• GreetingLabel.Text = CurrentDonor.GreetingMessage

If a donor row contains blanks in CatImageURL, the image control will show a broken link. Add a simple condition to handle that:

If(!IsBlank(CurrentDonor.CatImageURL), CurrentDonor.CatImageURL, "")

4. Add Auto‑Cycling with a Timer

Insert a Timer control and set these properties:

When the app opens, the timer fires and updates the display every 5 seconds. The user can still press the button to jump ahead.

5. Visual Polish

• Change the button’s Radius to make it round.
• Add a festive icon (use the Icon control).
• Use a cat emoji in the screen’s title (🐱).

Security, Performance, and Delegation Notes

• Permissions: SharePoint item‑level security works here. Users will only see donor data they have permission to view.
• Image loading: If users are on a slow network, enable Image.Cached and consider compressing GIFs before storing.

Common Mistakes

• URLs pointing to a web page: The Image control cannot render an HTML page. Verify that the URLs in CatImageURL end with .gif, .jpg, or .png.
• Forgetting to clear the variable: If you reuse the app for multiple sessions, consider resetting CurrentDonor on App.OnStart to avoid stale data.
• No handling for empty list: If Donors has zero rows, First(Shuffle(…)) will return Blank. Use If(!IsEmpty(Donors), …) to avoid errors.
• Timer running on a non‑active screen: A timer on a hidden screen still runs. To save resources, set AutoStart to false and start/stop it from the visible screen.

Recommendation

This app is a fun, low‑risk project to master variable management and media controls in Power Apps. Once it’s working, you can easily adapt it for birthdays, anniversaries, or any event that benefits from a personalised card.

After testing your cat‑themed greeting, share it with your team and see who can find the most ridiculous cat GIF. Happy building!

References

• Matthew Devaney’s original holiday post (source of inspiration) – https://www.matthewdevaney.com/
• Microsoft Learn: Shuffle function in Power Apps
• Microsoft Learn: Image control in Power Apps