Fabric Planning: Integrated Intelligence - An Introduction

The Intelligence sheet is where reporting, dashboards and analysis sit next to your plan, on the same semantic model and in the same Plan item. This session covers financial and paginated reporting, 100+ charts, KPI cards, filters and comments, then builds an Intelligence sheet live and ends with Q&A.

Key takeaways

1. Plan and report in one place. Most planning tools copy actuals out of the BI platform, then push the plan back for reporting, and every hop adds reconciliation and lag. In Fabric Plan, the Intelligence sheet reads your semantic model and your Planning and PowerTable sheets directly, so plan and actuals sit side by side without ETL.
2. Financial reports without DAX. You can reorder rows without a sort key, add calculated rows and columns, group rows and columns, apply cell- and row-level formatting, and add data input columns for values or commentary. Time intelligence, conditional logic and simple arithmetic are built in, so business users don't need DAX for them.
3. Pixel-perfect output, including Excel. Paginated reports get custom headers and footers, logos and pagination. Exports to Excel and PDF keep the formatting, variances and conditional formatting, because many users still finish their work in Excel.
4. 100+ charts, IBCS-certified. The chart library includes Marimekko, Sankey, waterfall, arrow and dot plots, and Gantt and Gantt resource views for comparing planned and actual schedules. IBCS templates apply in one click, and actual, plan and forecast variances are calculated for you when you map the measures.
5. KPI cards that scale out. A single card can carry icons, actual-versus-plan comparisons, a sparkline and a bullet chart. Drop a dimension into the trellis and one card becomes a set of small multiples, one per category.
6. Filters built for finance. Calendar filters handle year, quarter, month and week views, including 4-4-5 and 4-5-4 retail calendars, with YTD and MTD presets that need no DAX. You can save your own filter presets, paste a long list of values as a bulk filter, and use hierarchy and cascading filters.
7. Comments stay with the numbers. Comments work at cell, row and column level, with threads, @mentions and Teams or email notifications that link straight back to the report. Comments can be written back to Fabric SQL so other reports can use them.

FAQ

• Will Inforiver's Reporting Matrix be replaced by the Intelligence sheet?
  No. The Inforiver certified visuals for Power BI, including Reporting Matrix and Analytics+, carry on as they are. The Intelligence sheet is part of Fabric Plan, which is a separate product.
• Can Planning and Intelligence sheets be shared through Power BI org apps?
  Yes. Planning and Intelligence sheets can be embedded in a Power BI organizational app alongside Power BI reports, and existing app audiences control who sees what. They're also reachable in Teams and SharePoint.
• Does our data have to be perfectly clean before we can build reports?
  No. Clean data helps, but you can also bring an Excel file straight into PowerTable instead of starting from a semantic model, then clean it up and manage it there.
• Can one visual use measures from both a sheet and the semantic model?
  Yes. In the demo, one measure came from Planning and PowerTable sheets and another from the semantic model, in the same report.
• Can an Intelligence sheet be used as a source for Power BI visuals?
  Not directly. Write the data back to Fabric SQL and use it in Power BI from there. For most reporting on plan data, the Intelligence sheet itself has what you need.
• Is there a limit on the number of users in each role?
  There's no fixed user count. You pay for active sessions, by session type: Viewer, Stakeholder or Planner. A session runs for 30 days from when someone engages with a Plan item, and people who don't use it that month cost nothing. Use the capacity estimator to size it.

Resources

• Capacity estimator: https://community.fabricplan.com/capacity-pricing/
• Related webinar, Microsoft Fabric Planning: An Introduction (Apr 16): https://community.fabricplan.com/webinars/microsoft-fabric-planning-introduction/
• Related webinar, Billing, Pricing and Capacity Estimation (Sep 25): https://community.fabricplan.com/webinars/fabric-plan-understanding-billing-pricing-and-capacity-estimation/
• Related webinar, FabCon Barcelona Announcements (Oct 9): https://community.fabricplan.com/webinars/whats-new-in-fabric-planning-the-fabcon-barcelona-announcements/
• Documentation: https://community.fabricplan.com/docs/ (Intelligence sheets overview: https://community.fabricplan.com/docs/overview/intelligence-sheets-in-planning)
• Ask a question: https://community.fabricplan.com/forums/