Has anyone looked into Fabric Plan yet? Sharing what I found after spending time with it
I've been digging into Fabric Plan over the past few weeks and couldn't find much discussion about it here so figured I'd share what I found.
Quick context on what it is. It's a planning and reporting product built on Microsoft Fabric, put together by Lumel and Microsoft. It went into preview at a Microsoft conference in March.
It has three main parts. PowerTable is basically a spreadsheet style interface where you can edit data directly and it writes back to the database. Planning sheet is where you do budgets and forecasts, you can build driver-based models and run scenarios. Intelligence sheet is the reporting piece where you build the actual dashboards and financial reports.
What I found interesting is that these three pieces share the same data environment on Fabric. If someone updates a number in the Planning sheet, the Intelligence sheet picks it up without you having to export or move anything. There's also something called InfoBridge which works like a transformation layer between the sheets, similar concept to Power Query but for planning data.
I've spent most of my time in Intelligence sheet. The matrix component handles financial statement layouts pretty well, there are chart options that go beyond the standard Fabric visuals, and the filtering is more purpose built for finance use cases than regular slicers. It can also connect to existing semantic models on Fabric, not just planning data.
It's still early and I've hit some rough edges but the idea of having planning and reporting in the same place without moving data around caught my attention.
Got to try it after attending their introduction session a few weeks back. Happy to chat if anyone else is looking into this.