Aimplan consists of a group of custom visuals that you can download from AppSource and that always can be used as normal visuals in Power BI.

In Power BI, click "Get more visuals" and search for Aimplan

Add the "Aimplan Planning and Reporting Visual"

To be able to work with the Aimplan write-back function and some of the visuals other advanced features, this is normally connected to a license cost. For this training however, we have provided the Access Token (previous page) for you to be able to activate the visuals full features.

Add a new Power BI Page and add the Aimplan Planning and Reporting Visual. Drag at least one dimension to the Fields container (AccountName).

Now you can Click on the three dots in the upper right corner of your Aimplan Visual, go to edit mode and your visual settings, you can Set Access Token.



You could also generate and copy an access token from the Aimplan Portal or by using your Microsoft Entra ID and choose what instance you are currently working with.

When you are going to connect Aimplan Tables to your existing model, make sure you have:

Connect to your Aimplan tables as you would with any other Azure SQL Database. You can read more about Connecting to Aimplan Data here.

You want to set your Storage Tables to Direct Query Connectivity Mode in order to show your edited values instantly. This goes for all of the tables that you create yourself in Storage Tables. For the system dimensions; Measure, Scenario and User, Direct Query is not necessary and setting them to Import Connectivity Mode could improve your models performance depending on the size of these tables. Where applicable, choose Assume referential integriry for the relationships.

When using Aimplan with write back functionality in Power BI, the visual needs no know which user is currently working with the custom visual. This information is used when storing data in the Aimplan database to track which user has changed what data (audit trail).

Providing the visual with this information can be done in two ways, either through a measure, or with Microsoft Entra ID. For Aimplan Status and Comment visuals, Entra ID is mandatory, but with Planning and Reporting, you can create a measure that generates your User Key and input this in the value field 'Aimplan User Key'. Read more about the Aimplan User Key here.

Step 1:

Reference your User Principal Name:

Step 2:

Create a general measure that gives you your User Key Value:

Note! If your Principal name is not you email but your Machine name, look in the measure "No 2b. CurrentUserKey" in the Training .pbix-file and create this measure instead. In that case, you have to manually add your machine name and email into the table Machines by editing the source in Edit Query. Again, this is only necessary when working in Desktop, so you could just enter your UserKey-value as a temporary UserKey-measure when working in desktop and replacing it with the code above when you want to publish.

Step 3:

Since your User Key Measure comes from a dimension table and does not have relations to the other dimension tables, the User Key Measure needs to be altered not to generate cross-joins on all dimensions.

Read more about it here: Limit/Expand Number of Rows in Your Visual - Aimplan

Alter your User Key to each use case to limit when to generate the User Key or it will create cross-joins for all your dimensions. This as the dimension tables does not have relationships to each other.