This article provides answers to frequently asked questions about creating PowerTable sheets in Plan. Review these common scenarios to understand connection setup, table creation, supported data sources, and configuration options.
Unlike Explore PowerTable, the sheet isn't preconfigured, allowing you to set up all items from scratch.
The Set up connection process runs only once for each Fabric Plan item, not for each PowerTable sheet.
Completing the connection:
If you dismiss the banner without completing the setup, the Viewer capability remains unconfigured.
The Organizational account authentication kind authenticates the connection by using your signed-in Microsoft Entra identity instead of stored database credentials.
The Create New Connection dialog uses your currently signed-in account by default. If you want to use a different account, select Switch account.
No. You only need to create a connection once.
You can reuse the same connection for any PowerTable sheet that connects to a Fabric SQL database within your client. You don't need to create a new connection for each sheet.
No. A PowerTable sheet is a view and editing surface over a table in the Fabric SQL database. The sheet and the SQL table are named separately.
The sheet that you create is bound to the table that you create or connect to during setup. This separation allows edits to remain pending in the sheet until you select Save to Database.
Choose Existing Table when you want to connect the PowerTable sheet to a table that already exists in the Fabric SQL database.
Choose New Table when you want to create a new table by importing data from:
This option creates the table by using the spreadsheet's columns and data types without importing any rows.
Use this option when you want to create an empty table and bulk import or manually insert data later.
Selecting Identity Column while configuring a table creates an identity constraint in the database. The selected column becomes an auto-incrementing column.When you add new rows to the table, the value in the identity column increments automatically.
When you create a new table, you can import data from:
You can also connect to a semantic model in your tenant.
Currently, PowerTable supports connections only to Fabric SQL databases.
To use data from other sources, consider mirroring or copying the data into a Fabric SQL database before connecting PowerTable.
Enabling support for SCD allows you to configure a table with SCD Type II or SCD Type III tracking.
Depending on the option that you choose, you can maintain the history of:
Before you configure SCD Type II or Type III tracking, ensure that your table meets the required prerequisites. For more information, see the Microsoft documentation on Slowly Changing Dimensions.
