Cell Comments

The Aimplan Planning & Reporting Visual enables collaboration through comments on cell values. This guide will show you how to enable comments, as well as how to add and edit them.

Cell comments in the Aimplan Planning & Reporting visual act much like values. They are provided in the valuesbucket and should be aggregated. Unlike values, however, comments are not numerically aggregated and also rarely given their own column. Instead, comments are usually attached directly to a value, and as such, you configure them on the value itself.

In the following example, we'll be walking through how you can add comment functionality to a cost forecast report.

This is our starting point. As you can see, we have a visual in input mode with a grayed-out "Add comment" option. It is grayed out since it is not configured yet.

Before we can start configuring anything, we must provide the visual with the field from which it should read the comments. This is done by dragging the comment field to the values bucket. In most cases, this field is ValueComment from the planning table.

When dragging the field to the values, it is given a name like "First ValueComment". This is good, we want to grab the first value. We do however recommend renaming this field to just "ValueComment" since the word "First" might get translated by Power BI, which can cause unexpected results.



Once added to the visual, we need to let the visual know which comment-field belongs to which value. This is because a visual may contain multiple completely unrelated values & comments.

To do this, we will first enter edit mode. Once in edit-mode, navigate to the value you want to add comments to. In our example, this is "PlanValue" in our "Month" column-section.

In the Editable section of the values properties you will find a dropdown with the label "Comment Field". We need to select our comment-field in this dropdown.

Once provided, the visual will look in the comment-field to see if there is a comment associated with the value it is rendering. If a comment exists, it will be shown with a small triangle in the top-right corner. The contents of the comment can be shown by hovering the cell that has a comment indicator.

To add a new comment, simply right-click a cell and press Add Comment. Once pressed, a dialog will be shown allowing the user to enter text contents. When saved, the comment will be stored in the ValueComment field of the measure provided.

When a comment exists, the Add Comment button is replaced with Edit Comment. The button opens a similar dialog for the comment and changes are stored to the same field.

Comments can be removed either by right-clicking and pressing Remove Comment or by editing the comment and removing its content. A comment is considered removed when it has no content.