Supercharge Your Workflow: New Multitasking Features Coming to Fabric (Preview)
Fabric now supports smoother, faster multitasking with updates that streamline complex workflows across items and workspaces—bringing a modern IDE-like experience to developers.
What’s Changing?
We’re introducing a set of UI enhancements that improve how you multitask and navigate in Fabric — including horizontal tabs for open items, support for multiple active workspaces, and a new Object Explorer. These changes are designed to reduce friction, preserve context, and better support the way developers work in real life.
Key improvements include:
- Horizontal tabs for open items: Easily switch between notebooks, pipelines, reports, and more — with clear labels showing name, type, and indicators to identify which workspaces they belong to.
- Support for multiple open workspaces: You can now open and work across multiple workspaces side-by-side. Color coding and numeric labels make it easy to see which items belong to which workspace—helping reduce confusion and improving context when multitasking.
- Object Explorer: A structured view that lets you browse and open items across all your currently open workspaces without needing to jump between pages.
- Raise the open item limit: We’ve increased the previous 10-item cap, giving you greater flexibility to keep more tabs open and active — so you can stay focused across complex workflows without interruption.
Why the Changes?
We’ve heard your feedback, usability studies, and direct conversations that multitasking in Fabric can be challenging.
Common pain points include:
- Hard to identify items: The navigation bar made it difficult to distinguish between items and workspaces, especially with long names.
- Too many clicks to switch context: Moving between items and workspaces required too many interactions, disrupting focus and slowing down developer workflows.
- Limited multitasking: A cap on open items made it hard for power users to keep multiple resources at hand.
- Unfamiliar experience: The overall UX didn’t align with the expectations set by modern IDEs, making the experience feel less intuitive for developers.
These improvements are designed to address those issues and make Fabric feel more like the tools developers use every day.
These improvements apply only to the Fabric experience, and do not affect the Power BI experience.
Try out the new multitasking features as they roll out and let us know what you think! You can provide your suggestions at Ideas.
