5.1.1. Workspaces and Publishing Content

💡 First Principle: A workspace is a shared container with its own membership, settings, and capacity. Everything published to it (semantic models, reports, dashboards, dataflows, paginated reports, Fabric items) inherits its access model and its licensing mode, so workspace design is access design.

Create a workspace in the service (Workspaces > New workspace). Settings to know:

• Name, description, and image to help users find it.
• Contact list: who receives notifications and requests about the workspace (by default, workspace admins).
• License mode: Pro (shared capacity), Premium per-user (PPU), Premium capacity, Fabric capacity (F SKU), Embedded, or Trial. License mode determines available features: model size limits, refresh frequency, automatic page refresh minimums, Direct Lake, deployment pipelines, and Copilot (directly, or via a Fabric Copilot capacity). Content in a Premium or Fabric capacity workspace can be viewed by users with a free license (for F64 and larger, or P SKUs), whereas Pro workspaces require every viewer to have Pro (or PPU).
• Workspace OneDrive / SharePoint link for file storage, and advanced options such as allowing contributors to update the app, Git integration, and dataflow storage.

Workspaces exist for collaboration. Organizations commonly create separate workspaces per team or subject area, and separate development, test, and production workspaces managed with deployment pipelines (Premium/Fabric/PPU) to promote content between stages.

Publish, import, or update items:

• Publish from Desktop (Home > Publish) uploads the .pbix as a semantic model plus a report. Publishing again to the same workspace with the same file name prompts Replace, which updates the existing items while keeping their IDs, links, dashboard tiles, and app references.
• Upload/import a .pbix, .rdl (paginated report), or Excel workbook from the service's Upload option; files stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint can be connected so that saved changes sync to the service automatically.
• Update content by republishing; schedule refresh to update data (5.1.4).
• Download a .pbix from the service when allowed (not for every model type, for example large models with incremental refresh).
• Reports can also be created and edited in the service on top of published semantic models, and you can save a copy of a report into another workspace while keeping its connection to the original semantic model.

⚠️ Exam Trap: Republishing a .pbix with the same name and choosing Replace preserves the semantic model and report identity, so dashboards, app content, and shared links keep working. Deleting the old items and publishing fresh breaks pinned tiles and links. "Update the report without breaking existing dashboards" points to Replace.

Reflection Question: Why does a workspace's license mode affect which users can view its content, and what changes for free-license viewers when the workspace moves from Pro to an F64 Fabric capacity?