Turning everyday documents from SharePoint and OneDrive into analytics ready data with OneLake shortcuts
We’re making it easier than ever to bring the files your business lives in every day, such as Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint decks and PDF files, directly into your analytics in Microsoft OneLake.
With OneDrive and SharePoint shortcuts, you can now reference your existing files in Microsoft 365 as if they were part of your OneLake storage, without copying or moving data. Your productivity content stays where it is, while your data engineers, analysts and AI workloads get a unified view over all of it inside Fabric.
Why OneDrive and SharePoint shortcuts matter
Most organizations already keep a huge amount of business-critical context in OneDrive and SharePoint.
- Sales decks and quarterly business review presentations.
- Contract PDF files and statements of work.
- Planning spreadsheets, forecasts and trackers.
- Project documentation, design specifications and meeting notes.
Until now, bringing that content into your analytics workflows usually meant exporting, copying or syncing files into your data lake. This often creates silos, duplication and governance challenges.
With OneDrive and SharePoint shortcuts in OneLake
- Your files stay in place in OneDrive or SharePoint.
- You can see them as part of OneLake storage, next to your existing structured and unstructured data.
- Governance is simplified with access enforced through Fabric and OneLake under a single security and management layer.
This approach unlocks scenarios such as
- Joining Excel based forecasts with transactional data in your lakehouse.
- Indexing contract PDF files and project documents as part of your AI knowledge in Microsoft Foundry.
- Giving BI teams a single place to discover both operational tables and the documents that provide business context.
From files to insights with AI powered transforms
Shortcuts are a powerful way to virtualize your content into OneLake. Sometimes you want more than file access and need analytics ready data.
The transform step in the shortcut creation flow lets you optionally apply transformations to your shortcut data before you finish.
- Use transforms to project your shortcut data into structured tables for analytics.
- Keep shortcut and transformed data in sync as new files arrive in your OneDrive or SharePoint folders.
- Combine shortcut-based transforms with the rest of your Fabric workloads, including warehouses, notebooks and Power BI.
If you simply want quick access to your documents, you can skip the transform step and still benefit from unified access through OneLake.
Get started
To get started with OneDrive and SharePoint shortcuts in your lakehouse.
- Open a lakehouse in your Fabric workspace.
- Right click a folder and select new shortcut.
- Choose OneDrive or SharePoint Folder and connect with your organizational account.
- Select the folders that matter most for your scenarios such as sales decks, finance trackers and project documents.
From there you can use the same shortcuts to power reports, notebooks, AI agents and AI powered transforms, all while your files stay safely in OneDrive and SharePoint.
To learn more, refer to the Create a OneDrive or SharePoint shortcut documentation.
