How to Create a Folder in Power BI Workspace

If your Power BI workspace looks like a digital garage sale, you're not alone. Users have long been juggling a growing collection of reports, dashboards, and datasets in a flat list, making organization challenging. This article addresses that clutter head-on, showing you how to create and use the long-awaited folder feature to organize your Power BI workspace effectively.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

What Exactly is a Power BI Workspace?

Think of a Power BI workspace as a collaborative workshop for your data projects. It's a shared space where you and your team can create, publish, and manage related content like dashboards, reports, datasets, and dataflows. Instead of keeping everything siloed in your personal "My Workspace," you use workspaces to collaborate as a group.

For instance, a marketing team might have a workspace with reports on campaign performance, website traffic, and social media engagement. A sales team's workspace could house dashboards for sales quotas, pipeline velocity, and regional performance. Workspaces are essential for teamwork in Power BI, but they have historically had one major flaw: they get messy, fast.

As projects grow, the content list becomes a tangled stream of items. Examples might include:

• "Sales Report Final"
• "Sales Report Final v2"
• "Sales Report FINAL - FOR DAVE"
• "Copy of Sales Report"
• Dozens of underlying datasets

Finding the correct report becomes a detective game. It’s inefficient, frustrating, and increases the chance that someone will use an outdated or incorrect version of a report for a critical decision. For years, the Power BI community has been asking for a simple solution: folders.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Folders in Power BI: A Simple Fix for a Big Headache

In late 2023, Microsoft finally delivered. You can now create folders within a Power BI workspace, instantly bringing a familiar and intuitive organizational structure to your BI environment. It's a simple change, but its impact is enormous.

Using folders allows you to:

• Categorize logically: Group content by project, department, quarter, or any system that makes sense for your team.
• Reduce clutter: Tidy up the main workspace view, making it easier to see what’s important.
• Improve navigation: Find specific reports and datasets in seconds instead of scrolling through an endless list.
• Separate in-progress work: Create folders like "Drafts" or "Testing Grounds" to keep unfinished content separate from finalized, production-ready reports.

Folders make your workspaces make sense.

Before You Begin: Requirements for Creating Folders

Before you jump in, make sure you have the right permissions. You can't just create folders in any workspace without them.

Here’s what you need:

• A Power BI Pro or Premium license. Folders are not available on the free plan.
• An Admin, Member, or Contributor role in the workspace where you want to create the folder. If you have a "Viewer" role, you can see and navigate folders, but you can't create, modify, or delete them.

Step-by-Step Guide: Creating Your First Folder

Ready to bring some order to the chaos? The process is refreshingly straightforward. Follow these steps to create a folder in your workspace.

Step 1: Navigate to Your Workspace

Log in to your Power BI account at app.powerbi.com. On the left-hand navigation pane, click on "Workspaces" and select the workspace you wish to organize from the list.

Step 2: Locate the ‘New’ and ‘Folder’ Options

Once you’re in your workspace, you’ll see the full list of content. At the top left of the content list, click the + New dropdown button. You will see a new option in the list: Folder.

Step 3: Name Your New Folder

A dialog box will pop up asking you to "Enter a folder name." Choose a descriptive and clear name that reflects the content you plan to store inside. For example, "Q4 Marketing Campaigns" or "Sales Team Dashboards."

After entering the name, click the blue "Create" button.

That's it! Your new, empty folder will now appear at the top of your content list, distinguished by a folder icon. You can click on the folder name to navigate into it.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Smart Strategies for Organizing with Folders

Just creating folders isn't enough, you need a system. A little planning goes a long way in keeping your workspace tidy for the long haul. Here are some proven strategies for folder structures.

1. Organize by Project or Initiative

If your team works on distinct projects, this is a great approach. Create a top-level folder for each major project.

• Financial Audit 2024
• Project Phoenix Launch
• Website Redesign Analytics

Inside each project folder, you can create subfolders for different stages or content types, like "Raw Data," "In-Progress Reports," and "Final Dashboards."

2. Organize by Team or Department

For large, cross-functional workspaces, organizing by department can clarify ownership and make content easy to find.

• Marketing Team
• Sales Team
• Operations

3. Organize by Content Stage (Draft vs. Production)

This is a highly practical method to prevent stakeholders from accidentally viewing half-finished reports. Create high-level folders to separate development work from production assets.

• PRODUCTION (DO NOT EDIT): This folder only contains validated, final reports consumed by the broader business. Access can be communicated clearly.
• DEVELOPMENT_WIP: This is the sandbox where analysts work on new reports and update existing ones.
• ARCHIVE: For old or deprecated reports that you don’t want to delete but need to get out of the main view.

4. Organize by Data Source

If your reports are heavily tied to specific data sources, you might organize them accordingly. This makes it easy for data source experts to find what they need.

• Google Analytics 4 Reports
• Salesforce Reports
• QuickBooks Datasets

Managing Folders and Content

Once you’ve created your folders, you need to populate and manage them. The controls are intuitive and similar to managing files on your computer.

Moving Items Into a Folder

You can move items one by one or in bulk.

• Single Item: Find the report or dataset you want to move. Click the three vertical dots (More options) next to its name. Select "Move to" from the dropdown menu. A navigator will appear, allowing you to select the destination folder.
• Bulk Move: Check the boxes next to all the items you want to move. An option bar will appear at the top of the content list. Click "Move" and choose the destination folder. This is a massive time-saver for cleaning up a messy workspace.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Renaming or Deleting a Folder

To rename or delete a folder, click the More options (...) menu next to the folder's name. Here, you'll see options to "Rename" or "Delete".

Heads up: If you delete a folder, all the content inside of it will also be permanently deleted. Power BI will show you a warning, but be certain before you confirm. There is no "recycle bin" for deleted workspace items.

Current Limitations to Be Aware Of

The addition of folders is a huge quality-of-life improvement, but the feature is still in its early stages. There is one major limitation to understand:

Permissions are still managed at the workspace level. You cannot set unique permissions for a specific folder. For example, you can't create a "Managers Only" folder and hide it from everyone else in the workspace. If a user has access to the workspace, they have access to all the folders within it. This is a frequently requested feature, so we can expect Microsoft to explore folder-level security in the future, but for now, that functionality does not exist.

Final Thoughts

Folders are a fundamentally simple but game-changing addition to Power BI, providing the basic organizational tools needed to manage a large B.I. environment. By taking a few minutes to set up a logical folder structure, you can save your team countless hours of frustration and dramatically clean up your workspace.

Creating and organizing all those reports in Power BI is a crucial step towards building a data-driven culture. But much of the time is spent on the manual process of building, tweaking, and structuring things correctly. At Graphed , we simplify this first step by turning report creation into a conversation. Instead of dragging and dropping fields, you just connect your data sources - like Google Analytics, Salesforce, or Shopify - and ask for what you need in plain English, and we'll build the live dashboard for you in seconds.