Upcoming Changes to the Fabric Navigation Experience
Introducing upcoming changes designed to enhance your navigation experience with Microsoft Fabric. These updates aim to simplify your workflow and make navigation more intuitive.
What to Expect
Based on extensive customer feedback and research, we’re refining how you open and interact with Fabric. Currently, users access various workloads—such as Power BI, Data Engineering, Data Warehouse, and Data Science using the toolbar to switch between workloads. While this approach was intended to provide flexibility, we’ve heard that it can be confusing, leaving users uncertain about when and why to switch between workloads.
Introducing Two Experiences:
- Fabric: A unified experience that encompasses all workloads, optimized for technically inclined users who want to build data-focused items such as warehouses, ML models, lakehouses, data pipelines, semantic models, reports, etc., for their business solutions.
- Power BI: Designed for discovery and quick access, Power BI Home helps users find frequently used data, discover new content, and uncover insights – all optimized for business users.
Fabric
The Fabric experience uses a workspace-first approach, focusing on workspaces as the main organizational unit instead of workloads, allowing you to focus on your projects and your collaborators, without the need to switch between workloads constantly. The navigation bar and unified home are optimized to support workspace navigation and creation.
How it works
- Unified workspace-centric Home: A single Home focuses on creating and navigating to your workspaces. This clear emphasis will help you get to work quickly, without the distraction of needing to select a workload. You can either create a workspace using a predesigned template known as a task flow or start with a blank workspace and develop your own solution template later.
- Enhanced task guidance in workspaces: After entering a workspace, the task flow guides you through clearer pathways to create, locate, and manage your items. These items are categorized by task types based on their main capabilities, making it easy to find the most suitable options through our item recommendations. If you’re not using a task flow, you can still click the + New Item button to browse all available items, which are organized by task types rather than workloads. This encourages you to think in terms of projects and focus on what you want to build from start to finish.
- Streamlined Nav bar: The entire Nav bar is arranged to emphasize quick access to workspaces, and then focuses on the work you do within each area. You can now easily find and pin frequently visited areas for greater efficiency.
We believe this new workspace-centric navigation and task-oriented item creation flow allows you to focus on your projects without the distraction of selecting a specific workload.
- Grow your Fabric knowledge with Workloads: Workloads is now your go-to hub for discovering available workloads, along with comprehensive getting started guides and tutorials. It’s the place where you can learn how to leverage these workloads to maximize their impact on your projects. Whether you’re exploring new features or looking to deepen your expertise, you’ll find all the resources you need to get up to speed and drive better results.
Power BI
Power BI is designed for users focused on exploring insights in reports, apps, and semantic models. It features an item-first approach, providing direct access to items using Power BI tools. The Nav bar and Home are tailored for easy access to these items. For Power BI users not yet using Fabric, they can still access their workspaces, creation experiences, and Power BI items from this experience.
Experience for Existing Users
For existing users, here’s what you can expect with the new experience:
- If you’re currently using the Power BI experience, you will remain in that environment. However, you can easily access the Fabric experience through the button in the lower-left corner. If you’re utilizing Fabric capabilities, we encourage you to switch to the Fabric experience, as it is optimized for technically inclined users.
- If you’re using a non-Power BI experience, you will automatically be transitioned to the Fabric experience.
A Note for Admins
If you’re responsible for managing the tenant, please note that this update is solely a UI change focused on enhancing information architecture and navigation. There are no changes to admin settings; existing settings will remain in place.
We’re excited to release these enhancements and believe they will create a more intuitive experience for everyone using Fabric. Your feedback is invaluable to us, so please reach out with any questions or thoughts.
Happy navigating!
