What Is a Workspace in Power BI?

Last Updated on November 22, 2023

Power BI is one of the most popular business intelligence (BI) tools used by a variety of institutions to connect to data sources, clean and transform data, and create interactive visualizations of this information with charts, tables, maps, etc.

Workspaces are Power BI containers for dashboards, reports, workbooks, datasets, and dataflows. In simple terms, they are the work area where all the organization’s dashboards, reports, datasets, and other valuables are presented.

ONLC Training Centers offer Power BI training courses that walk you through how to design your workspaces and apps in Power BI.

Workspaces in Power BI Explained

Users of Power BI can create reports and dashboards that can be shared with others in their organization. Power BI workspace allows users to stage areas and containers for the content that will make up a Power BI app. It is also in the workplace where a user creates, publishes, and manages apps for their organization.

Power BI Apps are a collection of dashboards and reports created by a user to deliver and communicate key metrics and information to the Power BI consumers in your organization. 

Consumers can often interact with this app; however, they cannot be edited by consumers.

Types of Workspaces in Power BI

In Power BI, users are allowed to create two types of workspaces:

1. My Workspace

This is the default workspace that is created for each user when they first sign in to Power BI. It’s a personal workspace where you can create and manage your own reports and dashboards. You can also share your reports and dashboards with others, but they will only be able to view them.

1. Shared Workspaces

These are workspaces that can be created and shared with other users in your organization. They allow multiple users to collaborate on reports, dashboards, and data sets. You can also assign different roles to users, such as Member, Contributor, or Admin, to control who can access and make changes to the content in the workspace.

How to Create a Power BI Workspace

Now that you know the types of workspaces on Power BI, the process of creating one is fairly easy using the following steps:

Step 1: Launch the Power BI tool.

Step 2: On the left navigation panel, click Workspaces.

Step 3: In the window that opens, enter the name for your workspace.

Step 4: Choose if you want the workspace to be public or private.

Step 5: Add workspace members, and choose if they can edit content or only view content.

Step 6: Click ‘Save,’ and you have created a new Power BI Workspace.

Advantages of Power BI Workspaces

Power BI Workspaces offer organizations several advantages. Some of the major benefits of using Power BI workspaces as a team include:

1. Collaboration: With workspaces, multiple users can collaborate on reports, dashboards, and data sets in real-time. This makes it easy for teams to work together on a project, and to share insights and information.
2. Security: While you collaborate on reports, Power BI workspaces allow you to control access to content to ensure that sensitive data is only accessible by authorized users.
3. Automation: Power BI workspaces can easily be integrated into other Microsoft services including Power Automate, Power Apps, and Virtual Agents for more efficient and streamlined workflows. You can also import data using the DirectQuery mode in Power BI.
4. Flexibility: A workspace can be created for different teams, departments, or projects, which allows for a more flexible and efficient way of managing data and collaborating with others.
5. Reports, dashboards, and data sets can be easily reused across different workspaces as needed.

Limitations of Power BI Workspace

While there are undoubtedly numerous benefits of using Power BI workspaces, there are some limitations you should know about. Workspaces allow a maximum of 1,000 datasets and 1,000 reports per dataset. In addition, a user can join up to 1,000 workspaces.

In Conclusion

Power BI is a powerful tool that can help organizations gain insights from their data and make data-driven decisions. The workspace feature on the app is a great way to organize and collaborate on data and reports. For organizations, using Power BI workspaces can help subteams make better use of their data to gain insights for making better decisions.