Create a Planning Sheet

In this section, let us start planning with Lumel EPM's Planning Sheet. You can use any of your datasets to create it.

There are several ways to connect to or import data to begin planning, BI, data management, and writeback.

	Ways to Get Data	Description
1	Semantic Model	Connect to a semantic model to build a full-stack EPM app with your data model and writeback.
2	Excel	Import data from an Excel file for EPM and writeback the changes to your preferred destinations.
3	CSV files	Import data for your planning, BI, and data management from a CSV file. You can writeback the changes to your preferred destinations.
4	OneDrive	Import data from your OneDrive for EPM and writebacks.
5	JSON and Parquet files	Import data from JSON and Parquet files for EPM and writebacks to desired data platforms.
6	Live Database Table (PowerTable)	Connect to an existing database table through PowerTable and build a full-stack EPM app. The changes are synced/written back live to the same data source.

Let's build our first planning sheet by connecting to a semantic model. Here are the steps:

1. Create a New EPM item

1. Go to your Microsoft Fabric workspace (here it is FABRIC_COE_CORE), and then to your folder. Click on New item to create a new item.

Create a new item

1. Select Lumel EPM from the list of items. You may want to add it to your 'Favorites' by clicking on the star icon.

Select Lumel EPM item

1. Enter a name for your Lumel EPM item and click on Create. Description is optional.

Name your Lumel EPM item

Note: For practical reasons, most of the demonstrations in this guide either use Lumel EPM Staging or a QA item.

2. Connect to a Semantic Model

1. The Lumel EPM item you created opens, as shown below. Let us select the Semantic Model option to connect to an existing semantic model and begin the planning process.

Choose 'Semantic Model'

Other methods of importing data into your Lumel EPM are described in the following sections.

1. Select a semantic model of your choice from the list displayed and click on Connect.

Select a semantic model

1. The Lumel EPM item has now been successfully connected to the chosen semantic model. To see your loaded data, expand the Data pane.

Data loaded into Lumel EPM

3. Assign Data to your Planning Sheet

You can now begin using Lumel EPM to plan, visualize, and manage your loaded business data. The first step is to assign the required dimensions and measures into your field well in the Visualizations pane.

Assigning dimensions and measures

Your planning sheet is now ready!

Lumel EPM provides a wide range of basic and advanced planning, forecasting, business intelligence, and reference data management capabilities all in one product, without the need to write a single line of code. Let's explore them all in the upcoming sections.

In the next section, we'll discuss how to add a BI sheet. A Lumel BI sheet includes various visualization and business intelligence options, such as charts, KPI cards, dashboards, etc., that help you visualize, summarize, and report your data.