Introducing the ‘new look’ of workspaces in the Power BI service

To modernize and simplify the user experience in the Power BI service, last year, we launched a public preview of the ‘new look’ feature. The initial release was focused on improving overall the report viewing experience by introducing a vertical page navigation, surfacing additional metadata, simplifying the action bar. Since then, we’ve continued to evolve the new look experience based on your feedback and made incremental updates to validate our design.

Today, I’m excited to announce that we’re bringing the modern look and feel of the new look to a place where most of us spend time collaborating and managing content – workspaces.

Get ready for the ‘new look’ of workspaces in the Power BI service!

Like what you see? Read on to learn more about what’s changed or explore it yourself by navigating to any workspace with the New Look toggle turned on.

Feature overview

All workspaces, including classic and new workspaces, will receive the modern look and feel provided that the ‘new look’ toggle is turned on. Here’s a summary of what’s changed:

1. Get Data: We’ve made it much easier for users to add content to their workspace. The + New button provides one-click access to connect to data, open files, and create new reports, dashboards, and more.
2. View switcher: To see the connections between dataflows, datasets, reports, and dashboards and their connections to other data sources, users have an entry point in the top command bar to switch between list view and lineage view.
3. Search within workspace: Users will be able to search across all the content within their workspace with the new search box.
4. List and tabs: We’ve restructured the original tabs to give users a flat list of content like SharePoint. That’s right! Users will no longer be landing on the ‘dashboards’ tab after opening a workspace and getting confused. Here’s the new tab order:
   • All – Shows all content (dashboards, reports, workbooks, paginated reports, datasets, dataflows) within the workspace.
   • Content – Shows all content created for consumption (dashboards, reports, workbooks, paginated reports) within the workspace.
   • Datasets + dataflows – Shows all the datasets and dataflows within the workspace for easy data management.
   Note: End users that have read-only permissions will not see the datasets and/or dataflows in their workspace. They will only see the content they have access to.
5. Filters: For workspaces with hundreds of artifacts, users will be able to quickly filter the content using the new filters pane. Once a filter is applied, users will be able to see the filter on top of the content list.
6. Quick actions: All the quick actions for your content will be available on hover. The most common actions will be accessible in a single click, and everything else will be in the “…” ellipses menu.
   
7. New colors and icons – We’ve switched to a lighter color theme and updated icons within the workspace based on the Microsoft Fluent design system.

Roll-out plan

We recognize some of you may be accustomed to specific parts of the old user interface need time to adapt to the new design. All Power BI Service users will be able to opt-in to the new look of workspaces using the existing New Look toggle.  We will make it the default experience when the new look is generally available.

Next steps

• Check it out! Head on over to Power BI service and experience the new look of workspaces for yourself.
• Have any feedback? We’d love to hear it! Please leave comments below or in the Power BI forums