Managing Workspaces and Content

In Power BI, a workspace is essentially a container. Think of it as a folder or a project room where you, your colleagues, and your team can collaborate on building reports, dashboards, datasets, and dataflows. Before workspaces existed, every report lived in a single personal area called 'My Workspace'. That was like each person having their own desk drawer — you could only see your own stuff, and sharing meant physically passing files around. Workspaces were introduced to solve that problem, letting teams work together on the same content without stepping on each other's toes.

Every workspace has a 'role' system that controls what people can do inside it. The main roles are:

When a new workspace is created, it must be assigned to a type of storage location linked to a group of users. There are two kinds:

Once you have built reports and dashboards inside a workspace, you can package them into something called an 'app'. An app is a curated collection of the most important content from a workspace, presented in a simple navigation list for end users. Instead of giving people direct access to the workspace where everything is being built (which can be messy), you publish an app that gives them a clean, read-only view of the final dashboards and reports. App users only see what you want them to see, without the clutter of work-in-progress items or hidden datasets.

Now, what about 'content packs'? This is an older concept. Content packs were pre-built packages of dashboards, datasets, and reports that organisations could share internally or from external services like Salesforce or Google Analytics. They have been deprecated (meaning Microsoft no longer recommends using them and they are being phased out). The modern replacement is 'template apps', which serve a similar purpose but are built using the newer workspace architecture. For the PL-300 exam, you need to know that content packs still appear in legacy questions, but the correct modern approach is to use apps and template apps.

Creating a workspace is straightforward. You click 'Workspaces' in the Power BI Service (the online web portal), then select 'New workspace'. You give it a name, a description (optional), and assign it to a domain group if needed. Then you add members with specific roles. From there, you can upload reports, connect to data sources, and invite your team to collaborate. When everything is ready, you click 'Update app' to define the app's content, settings, and audience.

Finally, workspace management includes the ability to delete a workspace (which also deletes all its content — be careful!), restore a deleted workspace within a certain time window, and control who can create workspaces in your organisation (an admin setting in the Power BI Admin portal).

Let's follow a realistic scenario. Sarah is a Power BI analyst at a mid-sized retail company called 'GreenLeaf Home Goods'. She has just been asked to build a monthly sales report for the regional managers. Here is how she uses workspaces and content management every day.

First, Sarah creates a new workspace called 'Sales Reporting – Monthly'. She is automatically made the Admin. She then invites three colleagues: her sales team lead (as a 'Member' so he can edit reports), a junior analyst (as a 'Contributor' so she can work on data but not share it yet), and the VP of Sales (as a 'Viewer' so she can check progress without making changes). This role assignment is critical: it prevents the junior analyst from accidentally sharing an unfinished report, and the VP cannot break anything by editing a calculation.

Next, Sarah uploads a dataset from their SQL database containing last month's transactions. She builds a dashboard showing revenue by region, top-selling products, and return rates. The junior analyst builds a separate report on inventory levels. They both work in the same workspace, seeing each other's progress. Sarah uses the 'Get Data' feature to pull in data, and the workspace stores the dataset centrally so both reports use the same source—this avoids the classic mistake of two different reports showing different numbers for the same metric.

After two weeks, the reporting suite is complete. Sarah wants to distribute it to 50 regional managers who do not have Power BI Pro licences. Because their company owns a Premium capacity, she can create an app and set the 'audience' to a Microsoft Entra ID security group containing all 50 managers. These free users can now open the app from the Power BI Service or the mobile app and see only the final dashboards and reports—they cannot see the workspace's underlying datasets or edit anything. This is the exact situation PL-300 tests: knowing the difference between sharing a report directly from a workspace (which requires the user to have a Pro licence or be in a Premium capacity) versus publishing an app (which is the proper way to distribute a curated set of content).

The IT department has also set a policy that only admins can create workspaces, to avoid 'workspace sprawl'—a common problem where dozens of unused workspaces clutter the Power BI Service. So Sarah had to submit a request to the Power BI admin, who created the workspace for her and assigned her as Admin. This is another exam scenario: understanding who can create workspaces by default (all Pro users) and how to restrict that via the Admin portal.

Finally, when the project is over and the workspace is no longer needed, Sarah deletes it. But first, she exports the reports as .pbix files to archive them. The workspace is then deleted, and the content is gone after 30 days if not restored. This lifecycle management is part of the exam's focus on content management.

A common mistake Sarah avoids: she never shares a dashboard from 'My Workspace' because once she leaves the team, that content is lost. By using a shared workspace, the company retains ownership.