How to Use Microsoft Fabric in Power BI

Confused about what Microsoft Fabric is and how it changes your day-to-day work in Power BI? You're not alone. Microsoft has integrated its entire data analytics suite into a single platform, and understanding where Power BI fits in is the first step to leveraging its new capabilities. This guide will cut through the noise, explaining what Fabric is in practical terms and walking you through how to create your first report within this new, unified environment.

So, What Exactly Is Microsoft Fabric?

Think of Microsoft Fabric less as a new tool and more as a single, all-in-one analytics platform. Before Fabric, if you wanted to handle a complete data project, you had to jump between several different Microsoft Azure services: one tool to move the data (like Azure Data Factory), another to warehouse it (like Azure Synapse), and then finally, Power BI to visualize it.

Fabric brings all of those capabilities - which it calls "Experiences" - under one roof:

• Data Factory: For moving and transforming data from different sources.
• Synapse Data Engineering: For shaping and preparing large-scale data using Spark.
• Synapse Data Science: For building and deploying machine learning models.
• Synapse Data Warehousing: For traditional data warehousing and SQL queries.
• Synapse Real-Time Analytics: For analyzing streaming data from sources like IoT devices.
• Power BI: For business intelligence, reporting, and data visualization (the part you already know and love).

The key takeaway is that Power BI is no longer just a standalone application, it's now a core, integrated part of a much larger, more powerful platform. Everything you create in Fabric is automatically saved and managed in a central data repository called OneLake, which acts like a OneDrive for all your organizational data.

Why Power BI Users Should Care About Fabric

This all sounds great for enterprise data engineers, but what does it mean for you, the analyst or manager who just wants to build a report? It actually solves several common frustrations you've likely faced.

A Single Source of Truth with OneLake

The biggest benefit of Fabric is OneLake. Imagine a "Google Drive" for your company's data. Instead of emailing CSVs, connecting to fractured databases, or wondering if you have the latest SharePoint list, all data lives in one central, accessible place. When your finance team updates sales figures in the data warehouse, your Power BI report reflects it instantly because you're both looking at the exact same file in OneLake. This eliminates version control issues and arguments over whose numbers are correct.

DirectLake: The Best of Both Worlds

In old-school Power BI, you had two main ways to connect to data:

• Import Mode: Super fast performance because the data is loaded into your Power BI file, but it gets stale and needs to be manually or "scheduled" refreshed.
• DirectQuery Mode: Always shows live, up-to-the-minute data because it queries the source directly, but reports can be slow and laggy, especially with large datasets.

Fabric introduces a game-changing new method called DirectLake Mode. Because Power BI and the data source (OneLake) now live together in the same ecosystem, Power BI can read data directly from OneLake with the speed of Import Mode while still getting the real-time updates of DirectQuery Mode. This means your dashboards can be both lightning-fast and always current, without the traditional trade-offs.

Streamlined Data Prep in One Place

Everyone knows that 80% of data analysis is actually just cleaning and preparing the data. Previously, this often meant doing complex transformations in a separate tool before you could even open Power BI Desktop.

With Fabric, you can perform that entire workflow in one place. You can use Dataflows (which are essentially Power Query in the cloud) or a Notebook to clean raw data, save the clean version to your Lakehouse, and then immediately connect to it with Power BI. It streamlines the entire process, saving you countless hours of exporting, importing, and switching between applications.

Step-by-Step Guide: Creating Your First Power BI Report in Fabric

Theory is nice, but let's walk through a practical example. We'll take a simple sales CSV, load it into Fabric, and build a Power BI report using the new DirectLake mode. This will mimic a common workflow but show you the "Fabric way" of doing it.

Prerequisites

• A Microsoft account with a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license.
• A Fabric-enabled Workspace. You can create one by navigating to your Power BI service, selecting "Workspaces," "New workspace," and choosing "Fabric capacity" in the Advanced section.

Step 1: Create a Lakehouse to Store Your Data

First, we need a place to land our data inside Fabric. This is called a Lakehouse.

1. In your Fabric workspace, click the + New button.
2. From the list of options, select Lakehouse.
3. Give your Lakehouse a name, like "SalesAnalytics," and click Create.

You now have a container in your centralized OneLake repository ready to hold your data.

Step 2: Get Data into Your Lakehouse

Instead of opening Power BI Desktop and using "Get Data," we're going to load our file directly into the Fabric environment. For this example, let's assume you have a CSV file with sales data named sales_data.csv.

1. Inside your new Lakehouse, you'll see an "Explorer" pane on the left. Hover over the "Files" section and click the three dots (...).
2. Choose Upload -> Upload files.
3. Select your sales_data.csv file and upload it. Once uploaded, Fabric will automatically recognize it as a table and you can even preview it.

This is the simplest way. For more advanced scenarios, you would use a Data Pipeline or a Notebook here to pull data from other sources like a SQL database or an API, but the principle is the same: land the data in your Lakehouse first.

Step 3: Create a Power BI Dataset in DirectLake Mode

Now that our data is in OneLake, we need to create a Power BI dataset on top of it. This bridges the raw data with your report visualizations.

1. At the top right of your Lakehouse view, click the SQL endpoint button. This lets you view your Lakehouse data in a database-like format.
2. Once switched, you'll see your sales_data file in the Explorer as a table. From here, click the New Power BI dataset button in the ribbon at the top.
3. A pop-up will appear. Select the tables you want to include in your report (in this case, just sales_data) and give your dataset a name like "Sales Dataset." Click Confirm.

Behind the scenes, Fabric has just created a dataset that connects to your Lakehouse data using DirectLake mode - no additional configuration needed.

Step 4: Build Your Report

This is the part that will feel most familiar.

1. Once the dataset is created, Fabric will give you the option to "Create a report automatically" or "Create a report from scratch". Let’s choose from scratch.
2. You'll be taken straight into the familiar Power BI reporting canvas, right in your web browser. Your sales_data table and columns will be available in the "Data" pane on the right.
3. You can now start dragging and dropping fields to build visualizations, just as you always have. Create a bar chart showing Sales by Region, or a line chart displaying Revenue over Time.

The magic is what you accomplished: you've built a Power BI report on a centralized, governed data source that operates with breakthrough speed, all without once opening Power BI Desktop or wrestling with data refreshes.

Final Thoughts

Connecting Power BI with Microsoft Fabric is less about learning a new tool and more about adopting a new method. By moving data storage and preparation into Fabric Lakehouse, your reports become faster, more reliable, and always up-to-date thanks to features like DirectLake. This streamlines your entire workflow from raw data to insights, with Power BI at the heart of your organizational strategy.

While a unified platform like Fabric solves many data management headaches, the challenge for many marketing teams isn't just connecting to an internal database, but pulling in data from dozens of external systems - think Google Analytics, HubSpot, Facebook Ads, and more. That's why we built Graphed. We offer a turnkey solution to connect all your data sources in one place, enabling you to ask questions in plain English and get instant dashboards and analytics, no complex coding required. If you're looking for an easier way to unlock insights across your marketing stack, check out Graphed.