If you’ve been building canvas apps in Power Apps for a while, you’ve probably hit this question at some point: “How do I know which screen the user is currently on?”
Maybe you want to show a dynamic title in a header. Maybe you’re building a shared navigation component and want it to highlight the active screen. Or maybe you just want to debug something and see where your app is at any given point.
Whatever the reason, this tutorial covers every practical way to get the current screen name in Power Apps, with real examples you can use right away.
What “Current Screen Name” Means in Power Apps
Before jumping into formulas, let me quickly clarify what we’re talking about.
Every screen in a Power Apps canvas app has a Name — the one you see in the Tree View on the left side in Power Apps Studio. For example: HomeScreen, DetailsScreen, LoginScreen, and so on.
When your app is running, only one screen is visible at a time. Power Apps tracks that screen through the App object, and that’s exactly where we pull the current screen name from.
Get Current Screen Name in Power Apps
There are three main approaches:
- Using
App.ActiveScreen.Name— the cleanest, built-in method - Using a global variable to track the screen name manually
- Using a component with a custom input property (great for shared headers)
Let me walk through each one.
Method 1: Using Power Apps App.ActiveScreen.Name
This is the simplest and most direct way. Power Apps has a built-in property on the App object called ActiveScreen. It returns a reference to whichever screen is currently visible — and you can pull the .Name from it to get a text value.
The formula:
App.ActiveScreen.Name
Where to use it:
Put this in the Text property of a Label control on any screen. When your app runs, that label will automatically show the name of the current screen.
Here’s a quick example. Say you have a label And you want it to always show the current screen’s name:
- Select the label
- Go to the
Textproperty in the formula bar - Type:
App.ActiveScreen.Name
That’s it. No variables, no extra setup.
You can also use it for comparisons:
App.ActiveScreen = HomeScreen
This returns true if HomeScreen is currently active, and false Otherwise, this is really handy when you want to conditionally show or hide something based on which screen is active.
For example, if you have a Back button and you only want it visible when the user isn’t on the home screen:
Visible = App.ActiveScreen <> HomeScreen
One important note: App.ActiveScreen.Name reads the screen name as it’s defined in the Tree View of Power Apps Studio — not a custom title you’ve assigned. So if you named your screen Screen3, that’s what you’ll see. Good naming conventions matter here, which I’ll touch on at the end.
Method 2: Track Screen Name With Power Apps Global Variable
This method is older and more manual, but it’s still used in many apps — especially ones built before App.ActiveScreen was reliable or in complex apps where you need full control over the displayed title.
The idea: You set a variable (varScreenTitle) when the user navigates to a screen, and then display that variable in a label.
Step-by-step setup:
- In
App.OnStart, initialize the variable with your starting screen’s title:
Set(varScreenTitle, "Home")
- On each button or navigation action that takes users to a new screen, set the variable before calling
Navigate:
Set(varScreenTitle, "My Leave");
Navigate(MyRequest_Screen,ScreenTransition.CoverRight);