Skip to content
CSA Loom — the Microsoft Fabric experience for Azure tenants where Fabric isn't yet available: lakehouses, warehouses, notebooks, semantic models, Activator rules, Data Agents, across Commercial, GCC, GCC-High, and DoD IL5

Tutorial: Plan editor

CSA Loom plan editor — verified working against a live console by the UAT harness on 2026-07-01.

Open the editor

  1. Sign in to your CSA Loom Console (for example https://<your-console-host>).
  2. Open or create a workspace from the Workspaces page.
  3. Click + New item and choose Plan from the catalog.
  4. The editor opens at /items/plan/<id>:

Plan editor

What this editor does

A Plan (preview) is the Fabric IQ EPM/CPM item: build budgets and forecasts across periods, branch what-if scenarios, and compare plan vs actuals. In Loom it is Azure-native — planning cells persist to Cosmos and write back to an Azure SQL database; actuals come from a bound semantic model. No Microsoft Fabric capacity required.

Getting started

  1. Add line items and periods — Define budget/forecast line items on the Planning sheet and the periods (months, quarters) to plan across.
  2. Branch scenarios — Create baseline, optimistic, pessimistic, and custom scenarios; each branch clones the source assumptions so you can model what-ifs side by side.
  3. Spread and breakback — On a roll-up parent cell, Spread evenly / by growth % / by weight allocates a total down to the child cells (with a preview table), and Breakback (edit total) edits the parent's total and pushes the change proportionally back into the children.
  4. Flag driver rows — Mark assumption rows (headcount, price, growth rate) as Drivers — they sort first in the Formula builder's picker and the dependency-ordered recompute evaluates drivers before the formulas that consume them.
  5. Ask Plan Copilot — Open the Plan Copilot rail to explain a variance, draft a forecast, or sanity-check the budget — it grounds an Azure OpenAI chat on this plan's cells, variance, and model.
  6. Compare plan vs actuals — Turn on the variance overlay to see Δ and Δ% against actuals from the bound semantic model (or entered manually).
  7. Write back to Azure SQL — Configure a backing Azure SQL database in Settings, then Write back to MERGE planning cells into dbo.loom_plan_cells for governed, queryable storage.

Learn more

Verified by the UAT harness