Build a connected plan

Organizations often maintain planning, analytics, and operational data across multiple systems. This fragmentation leads to duplicated data, disconnected workflows, and slow decision-making.

Plan offers a unified suite of capabilities - Planning, Intelligence, and PowerTable - on Microsoft Fabric. Together, they provide a single solution for organizations to build plans, analytics, and data applications directly on top of existing semantic models in Microsoft Fabric. It empowers business users to streamline their planning, forecasting, and reporting workflows; improve decision-making; instantly create apps based on semantic models; and maximize the value of their Fabric investments.

The platform is designed for business users and features a no-code, self-service architecture.

In this tutorial, you learn how to:

• Create and configure a planning sheet.

• Perform planning and analysis using semantic model data.

• Manage master and reference data using PowerTable.

• Visualize plans, budgets, forecasts, and simulations with real-time intelligence.

• Import reference data from PowerTable into a planning sheet.

• Writeback actuals, plans, and forecast values to the Fabric SQL database.

Plan overview

The planning solution is built on three core components: the Planning Sheet for planning and forecasting, Intelligence for analytics, and PowerTable for managing reference data. Plan applications run natively within Microsoft Fabric and leverage the existing semantic model as the foundation for analytics and planning workflow.

Components	Purpose
Planning Sheet	Create budgeting, forecasting, and planning applications
Intelligence	Build analytics, dashboards, and reports
PowerTable	Manage master, reference, and operational data.
Infobridge	Connect to multiple data sources. Transform and consolidate into a single unified plan report.

This tutorial uses a fictional company called Seahills Retail. Seahills Retail is a beverage retailer that tracks revenue data across its stores. You enter discount rates, calculate net revenue, create a forecast for net revenue, and simulate the impact of discount changes on revenue. You also integrate reference data from PowerTable and use it in your planning workflow.

By the end of the tutorial, you’ll be able to build a plan, create forecasts, simulate various scenarios, integrate master data, and create reports that answer business questions such as: What is the top product by revenue across all stores?

Prerequisites

Before starting this tutorial, ensure you have:

• Access to Microsoft Fabric.

• A semantic model containing business data.

• Permissions to create Plan items.

• Basic familiarity with Power BI or Fabric semantic models.

Create a database connection

1. Go to Settings > Manage connections and gateways.

2. Select New.

3. Select Cloud.

4. Enter a Database Connection name.

5. In Connection type, select SQL database in Fabric.

6. Set the Authentication method to OAuth 2.0.

7. Select Edit credentials, and then sign in with your Microsoft account.

8. Select Create to create the connection.

1. You can share the created connection and manage the user permissions.

Create a connection to the semantic model

1. Go to Settings > Manage connections and gateways. 

2. Select  New. 

3. Select  Cloud. 

4. Enter a Connection name. 

5. In Connection type, select Power BI Semantic Model. 

6. Set the Authentication method to OAuth 2.0. 

7. Select Edit credentials and then sign in with your Microsoft account. 

8. Click Create to create the connection. 

1. This connection will be used to connect to your semantic models when you create a plan.

Create a SQL database

1. Navigate to the required workspace and folder.

2. Add New item and select SQL database.

1. Enter a name for the database, and then create it.

Create Plan

1. In your workspace, click New Item > Plan(Preview).

1. Enter a name for your plan and create it.

1. Connect to an existing database connection.

1. Select the database to store your items and click Add.

1. In the Data pane, click Add, then click Connect to your semantic model.

You can get your data from a semantic model or from Excel/CSV, then create a planning sheet—or create a planning sheet first and connect it to your data. In this tutorial, you create a planning sheet and connect it to a semantic model.

1. Click Add to connect to the semantic model.

1. Add semantic model data into your fields, and your first planning sheet is created.

Insert a data input measure

Insert a data input measure to capture the discount rates applied across regions and product categories.

1. From the Insert Column menu, select Number > Insert a new empty series to create a new data input measure.

1. Enable the Column Grand Total to enter the discount rate and allocate it across regions and products.

1. Enter the total discount rate in the Grand Total cell to distribute it across regions and products. Select the cell and click the Allocation icon. Then choose Distribute by weights of 2025 Gross Sales. This allocates higher discounts to regions and products with higher sales and lower discounts to those with lower sales.

Allocations can be changed at any time during the planning process.

Insert a formula measure

From the Insert Column menu, select Formula, and enter a formula to calculate net revenue using the discount rate.

Create a forecast

1. Click Model > Forecast to create a forecast for Q1 2026. Select the Forecast Period as Jan 2026 to Mar 2026.

1. The forecast column is generated for closed periods as well, such as 2025. For Closed Period, select Formula and enter the formula in the formula box.

To populate a closed forecast from an existing measure, select Measure as the Closed Period option, and then choose the measure from the Linked Measure menu.

3. Select Data Input to allow users to manually enter forecast values. Click Create.

Set Open Period to Measure or Formula to populate the forecast using an existing measure or a formula.

1. Initialize the forecast values using an existing measure in the report. Select the measure from the Copy Source menu.

Select Blank to manually enter all the values.

5. You can use existing measure values to initialize forecasts in three ways: for a range of periods, for a specific period (month, quarter, or year), or as the average value over a period range. Here, you select the period range and click Save.

1. The forecast is generated with read-only values for closed periods. For open periods, the forecast is initialized using values from an existing measure.

Create a scenario

Scenarios allow planners to evaluate different business outcomes by modeling alternative assumptions on the same dataset. Scenarios help teams compare multiple possibilities, such as best-case, worst-case, or expected outcomes, and understand how changes in key drivers affect business performance.

Planning sheet scenarios enable users to create independent versions of planning data without modifying the baseline values. Each scenario stores a separate set of inputs and calculations, allowing users to simulate different strategies and compare their impact across measures, dimensions, and time periods.

Consider that Seahill Retail wants to change its discount percentage during the holiday season and understand how it affects its net revenue.

1. Go to Model > Scenario.

2. Enter a name for the scenario in Scenario name.

3. Select the required series to simulate and click Create.

1. Simulate the cell values by adjusting the slider to increase or decrease the discount percentage. Net revenue is recalculated according to the simulation.

2. Click Save to save the scenario after reviewing the results.

Writeback plans, scenarios, and forecasts

Export calculations, data inputs, forecasts, scenarios, and simulations, along with native measures, to a SQL database in Fabric.

1. Set the writeback table structure from Writeback > WB Type. Select Long to store measures as key-value pairs.

1. Enter the database connection, database name, schema, and writeback table name to configure the writeback destination. Click Add.

1. Choose whether to write back only the report or include any associated scenarios. Select Writeback All from the Writeback menu. Select the required scenarios to writeback. Click Writeback.

1. Click Logs to view the writeback run history.

Create a PowerTable Sheet

PowerTable is a reference database and workflow management app. Use PowerTable to access reference data from an existing database, such as an external forecast projection. PowerTable connects directly to the database containing the reference data.

In the steps outlined above, you would have created a plan, forecast, and a few scenarios before writing back all data to your preferred database.

In a connected planning scenario, you start with actual revenue data and then add context from external sources like Excel files or reference tables from other data platforms. The additional context can include information such as store footfall, demand change forecasts, promotional campaign projections, and so on. You can use them for calculations within the planning sheet or perform further downstream processes.

1. In your Plan, click on the + and then select PowerTable to add a new PowerTable sheet.

Note

The forecasts, scenarios, and a few formula measures are hidden in the Planning sheet below for easy demonstration. You do not need to duplicate the planning sheet or hide the measures in the actual use case.

1. Enter a name for the sheet and click Create.

1. Click on Create a New App to create a table app.

1. When creating a new app, you need to select a DMT connection to connect to your Fabric SQL database. Select a connection and click Connect.

1. Select your Fabric SQL database. The metadata for your app is stored here. Click Add.

1. Select Existing Table to connect to a table (Proj) in the Fabric SQL database. Select the Schema and the Table Name containing the reference data. Click Next.

1. PowerTable detects column properties automatically. You can edit them if necessary. After verifying the details, click Finish.

You have now successfully connected to the required reference database using PowerTable. You can see the Projected Revenue column. Click Save to save the report if it is not saved.

Create a bridge to connect to PowerTable

Using InfoBridge, you can connect to this PowerTable sheet and bring in the additional measure, Projected Revenue, to the Planning sheet.

1. Expand the Queries section in the Data pane.

2. Select Add, and then choose the external data source to connect to (Excel, CSV, Planning sheet, PowerTable, etc.). Here, you choose PowerTable Sheet.

Note

Alternatively, you can also select Create From Scratch to create a bridge from scratch.

1. Select the PowerTable sheet you created and click on Preview to preview the data.

1. In the preview screen, you can preview the data, add filters if necessary, and click Add.

1. The Infobridge screen opens with PowerTable data added as a query. Here, you can transform your data to match the planning sheet data.

Use Column Data type option to convert the data type of any column (Year, Quarter, etc.) and Pivot Table to structure your rows and columns as required. Click Apply to apply the transformation.

The data is now transformed.

1. Go to the planning sheet to view the transformed query in the Queries pane.

1. You can assign measures from the query to the planning sheet's Values field. You have successfully connected a projected revenue measure from the reference database to your planning sheet.

This tutorial demonstrates one way to implement a connected planning scenario. You can integrate data from multiple sources, including Excel, CSV, Parquet files, and other Planning or PowerTable sheets.

Use transformation options such as Merge, Join, and Append to combine queries from different sources. The LOOKUP function can then be used to retrieve values from a bridge query and map them to the corresponding keys in the Planning sheet.

Data refresh and Sync options are available to keep the planning model aligned with updates in the connected sources. This unified setup ensures that changes made in the source systems are automatically synchronized with both the Infobridge and the Planning sheet.