Learn Fabric Planning,
One Episode at a Time.

Every planning app in Microsoft Fabric lives inside a Plan work item, and this episode creates your first one. Before you can, two switches have to be on: Fabric IQ enabled for your tenant, and the Plan work item itself enabled by your tenant admin. We show you where to check both in the workloads list and where the step-by-step prerequisites documentation sits. After that it takes three clicks - New item, search for Plan, name it, Create.

A Plan work item is empty until you point it at data, and in Microsoft Fabric that means connecting your semantic model through a DMTS connection. This episode covers both routes: picking a DMTS connection that already exists in your workspace, or creating one from the artifact with an organizational account. Once shared with the workspace, that connection works for everyone. We then select the semantic model, click Add and Connect, and confirm it has landed in the Data pane.

Time to build the planning app itself - the sheet your planners will work in. Starting from a blank canvas, this episode walks through the Data pane, the Fields pane and the Fabric SQL database connection that makes the app collaborative. Then the build: six row dimensions from Region down to Product, the date hierarchy across the columns at year, quarter and month, and Revenue Actual as the native measure. We finish with quick formatting on auto and sized column widths.

Everything so far has been read-only. This episode makes the sheet writable. A measure from the semantic model is a native measure; anything created inside the planning app is a visual measure - and the first one we build is a data input measure, Revenue Plan, created from Revenue Actual as the reference. Then the part planners care about: turn on the column grand total, type 300M into it, and the delta distributes down the hierarchy by the weights of the reference measure.

If you have spent years writing formulas across cell ranges in a spreadsheet, this episode is the reset. We add Product Selling Price from the semantic model, then create a formula measure called Units Actual - Revenue Actual divided by Product Selling Price - set as a visual measure with Sum on the column and formula execution on every row. The point is the engine: you select measure objects, not ranges or arrays, and one expression fills the whole grid, grand total included.

Not everything in a planning sheet is a number that changes every month. Owners, dates, statuses and names belong to the row, not the time period - and that is what a visual column is for. We tidy the view first (column grand total off, filtered to 2026), then add a Person column renamed to Country Manager, with input allowed in both read and edit mode. Assign a user to China, copy that name to all rows in China, and confirm it does not bleed into any other country.

A number without its reasoning is a number nobody trusts. Notes are where the assumption behind the figure goes, and there are two ways to use them: attached to a single selected cell with formatted free text, or as a dedicated notes column that stores a note against the row. This episode covers both, plus the options around them - hiding notes, viewing every note in the app at once, and marker mode for flagging a specific note.

Notes record what you were thinking. Comments are how you get someone else to act. This episode adds a cell-level comment, shows why an untagged comment notifies nobody, then tags a user - and with Teams notification toggled on in settings, the mention lands directly in Microsoft Teams. Then the comments column, with assignee and status, turns commenting into a process: comment, assign, the assignee applies +10%, the delta spreads by cell weight, and the step is resolved.

The numeric values of your measures can be aggregated directly inside the Planning Sheet. This episode pulls Selling Price in as a column from the Products table rather than a DAX measure, forces it from Average to Sum, and shows why the number immediately looks wrong - it is summing every row across all six row dimensions. Three routes lead to Manage Aggregation, where every measure in the sheet appears, displayed or hidden. Switch to Average Leaf and the number lands.

The model is right - now make it readable. The closing episode of Season 1 clears what is no longer needed, hides the header, and adds a dollar sign to Revenue Plan through prefix and suffix insertion. Then into the Format tab and the extended ribbon: display, font, alignment, page setup, style, ruler and global settings. We stay on Appearance for the basics - background colour and transparency, major, minor and vertical grid lines, row spacing and fonts.