Row Comments

The Aimplan Planning & Reporting Visual enables collaboration through comments on rows. This guide will show you how to implement row comments.

The comment value works similarly to the numeric values you add, meaning you can add comments on a total row and allocate them to the underlying rows if you want, or you can add them directly at the lowest level. For example, you can add a general comment for when you expect a price increase to hit, or add specific comments for big vendor changes or other known factors that you expect will affect the outcome.

Row comments in the Aimplan Planning & Reporting visual act much like values, meaning they store the comment value on each unique combination of keys. Since your comment is being added on an entire row, this means it will share key combinations with your other planned values. This is important to remember, as Aimplan only shows the latest input value for each unique combination of keys. This would mean that if you use the same key for your numeric inputs as for your comment inputs, they would override eachother as each row looks the same. To make sure you do not overwright values, you need to separate the comment value from your plan values. You do this by having designated Aimplan measure for your row comments.

As you store your row comment on a specific Aimplan measure, we recommend creating a measure in DAX that generates your comment value filtered to the measure key that represent your comment measure in the Aimplan Portal.

You add this measure to the valuesbucket in your visual as you would with a numeric measure.

There are two significant differences between a comment measure and a numeric plan measure in Aimplan.

Row comments are as the name indicates, added on rows. They can of course be separated by fields just as other measures. One of the most common use cases is however to plan numeric values on months, and add a row comment for the full year, not separated by month. This would mean you get 12 inputs for your row comment (one for each month) if you have one row per input-cell in your visual.

This in itself is not an issue, but if you have a case where you do not want to allow top-down allocations, you would need to alter your comment value to only store on one value. This could be done by using a filter and defining it by the first value of a date field.