Set up Microsoft Fabric with Microsoft 365 Developer Account

data

fabric

2024-02-09
2 minutes to read

Table of Contents

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

This post is over 3 months old, Fabric is evolving at such a rapid pace!! Please be mindful of that when reading this post, young Padawan, as it could be outdated. I try to keep things up to date as much as possible. If you think something needs updating, please let me know in the comments.

Introduction

Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises that covers everything from data movement to data science, Real-Time Analytics, and business intelligence. It offers a comprehensive suite of services, including data lake, data engineering, and data integration, all in one place.

In this post, I will show you how to get started with Microsoft Fabric using a Microsoft 365 Developer Account. This will provide you with a Microsoft 365 E5 subscription where you can provision Microsoft Fabric.

Create a Microsoft 365 Developer Account

To get started with Microsoft Fabric, you will need a Microsoft 365 Developer Account. You can sign up for a free account at this evergreen link . You will be assigned a Microsoft 365 E5 developer subscription which you can use for non-production projects i.e. learning purposes. Sign in, answer a few details about you, then use the quick start settings:

Shows an option window that says ‘Set up your Microsoft 365 E5 sandbox. There are two options - instant sandbox or configurable sandbox. Choosing configurable sandbox can take up to two days to provision! There is also an image that stats that the subscription will be live for 90 days.

Create a login for this account. Note that this is not the same as your current Microsoft account.

Shows the ‘Set up your Microsoft 365 E5 instant sandbox’ options, here you are asked to select a region and set an admin user account.

Once your sandbox subscription is created, it will have a domain name similar to yourdomain.onmicrosoft.com and so your account’s email address will be adminusername@yourdomain.onmicrosoft.com . Once your Developer Sandbox is created, you can log in to Microsoft 365 using your new account.

Shows the main page Microsoft 365 for my developer tenant.

Enable Microsoft Fabric

Open up Power BI , you will need to sign in using your new developer admin account. Click on your profile icon in the top right-hand corner and click start trial:

The Power BI service homepage is open, the options menu for the profile is activated. A ‘start trial’ button is shown.

You get a warning about upgrading, yada, yada, click the button!

Shows a description that explains you are about to start a Fabric free trial.

Now you can open Fabric home:

A message is shown that confirms that you have upgraded the tenant to a free Fabric trial.

And now you have access to Microsoft Fabric.

Shows the Fabric Homepage. There are multiple experiences available from this page - Power BI, Data Factory, Data Activator, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Science, Synapse Data Warehouse and Synapse Real-Time Analytics.

What Next?

Now it’s time to get started with the introductory modules on Microsoft Learn .

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