What is a Power BI “Workspace”? Here’s how it works!

What is a Power BI workspace? 

In simple terms, a Power BI workspace is a place where you can work with your team in creating dashboards and reports.

Before Power BI rolled out the new workspace, creating a workspace would automatically create an underlying, associated Office 365 group.

Here’s a rundown of the changes with the new workspace:

• Creating a workspace in Power BI now doesn’t create an Office 365 group
• More granular workspace roles with more flexible permissions management
• Assigning workspace roles to user groups
• Admin’s control over who can create workspaces in Power BI
• Can’t create and consume organization content pack

To start, click ‘Workspaces’ on the left navigation pane (or its icon if you got the pane minimized).

Then, click ‘Create a workspace’:

Power BI will now ask you to complete the details of your workspace.

If you would like to use a workspace image, simply upload the picture.

When creating a workspace name, Power BI will check if that name was already taken. If so, you have to use another name.

Then, provide a brief description of your workspace.

Once you’re satisfied, click ‘Save’.

Congratulations! You just made your first Power BI workspace! 👍

Power BI will then show you to your team’s workspace:

If you would like to change your workspace’s name and description, click ‘Workspaces’.

This time, hover over your workspace until you see an ellipsis icon on its right side.

Click it and select ‘Workspace settings’:

Power BI will open a pane similar to the one when you have to create a new workspace.

If you would like to change the advanced settings, click ‘Advanced’:

By default, workspace admins (user or group) are notified. If you would like to change that, add the users or groups to the contact list.

Also, you can configure an Office 365 Group’s SharePoint Library file storage to be available.

If you have got everything set up, don’t forget to ‘Save’ the changes.

We still haven’t addressed the main point of a workspace:

How to add admin,s members, or contributors?

Here’s how:

Again, click ‘Workspaces’ and click the ellipsis icon beside your workspace’s name.

But this time, click ‘Workspace access’:

Here, you can add others to your workspace.

Simply type in their email addresses, select their roles, and click ‘Add’.

You can also change a member’s role later or even delete them from the workspace.

Super easy, right!? 😁

If you would like to create a new classic workspace instead of the new one, Power BI made it easy.

First, follow the first few steps as in creating a new workspace:

• Click ‘Workspace’ at the left navigation pane
• Click ‘Create a workspace’

This time, instead of going through creating a new workspace, click the ‘Revert to classic’ link:

Provide your new workspace’s information:

• Name
• Status (public or private)
• Member’s role (edit or view)
• Members

The advanced option contains an option about using dedicated capacity.

Once you’re done, click ‘Save’:

That’s it! 👍

Workspaces also have limitations:

• Maximum of 1,000 datasets
• Maximum of 1,000 reports per datasets
• Power BI Pro users can be a member of 1,000 workspaces maximum
• Power BI publisher for Excel not supported

A workspace in Power BI will allow your team to collaborate easily — create and refine collections of dashboards, reports, and paginated reports.