Showing posts with label Licensing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Licensing. Show all posts

Friday, February 13, 2026

Fabric Workspace Settings Update: "License Type" Renamed to "Workspace Type"

Just a quick post because I noticed a change in the Fabric UI, specifically in the Workspace settings.

I am working on a demo for my Power BI Gebruikersdagen session, and wanted to switch a workspace to Fabric capacity. I noticed that the setting License type has changed, and is now called Workspace type.

You can see the new layout in the screenshot below.

The new setting called Workspace type


As you can see in the screenshot, there are now 2 groups of workspaces (= licenses):

  • Power BI only workspace types
  • Fabric and Power BI workspace types
The 1st category is for a Pro or PPU user license or an embedded SKU.
The 2nd type is for capacity licenes only, with an F or FT (trial) SKU, or an old P-SKU


There's no change to the licensing itself (at least as far as I know), it is just a slight rewording of the already available types of user and capacity licenses. The documentation on Workspace types is already updated to reflect these changes.
I've checked 3 different tenants, and in all of these I saw the same new setting being displayed. All these tenants are in the West-Europe region, and because it might not be available in all regions worldwide your tenant may still be showing the old License type.

I like the new categories and more clear distinction between Power BI and Fabric workspace types.
Let me know: Do you like this change?

Tuesday, September 23, 2025

Power BI - Requirements to Use Analyze in Excel

I think I now got this question 4 times in the last months, so I thought I'd write it down so I can reference it later, and point people to it 😄

What are the requirements so (a group of) colleagues can start using Analyze in Excel?

Good question, let me break it down. 
In general, I think it's also better to use Analyze in Excel than Export to Excel!
Reza Rad also wrote about why that's important earlier.


Prerequisites to use Analyze in Excel

  • Power BI license
    You either need a Power BI Pro or PPU license, or the semantic model you connect to must be in a workspace backed by a Power BI Premium / Fabric F-capacity, this needs to be an F64 or higher SKU. Although I have seen some instances where it might have (temporarily) worked with a lower F-SKU, this is not supported/allowed (see Power BI licensing).
  • Tenant Setting
    Your Power BI / Fabric Administrator needs to enable the Tenant setting in the Admin Portal: "Users can work with Power BI semantic models in Excel using a live connection". You can learn more about that setting on the admin portal documentation.
  • Semantic Model permissions
    The user needs at least build permissions on the semantic model, or at least the Contributor role in the workspace. Ideally you put people in an Entra ID group and give that the appropriate permissions.
  • Excel
    You obviously need Excel Desktop or Excel for the web installed for it to work. You might have to install some updates for it to work.




A few things to be aware of:

  • Analyze in Excel creates a dynamic, live connection to the Power BI dataset, so any changes to the dataset will be reflected when the Excel report is refreshed
  • Free users can analyze data from Premium workspaces without needing a Pro license, provided they have the appropriate role (at least build permissions or Contributor role) assigned in that Premium workspace
  • You'll need to use measures in the PivotTable's values area, as you can't directly drag numeric columns like 'cost' into that area. It's anyway better to create explicit instead of implicit measures

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