Microsoft Fabric is a central platform for data and analytics, and one of its powerful features that supports it being an all-in-one platform is Shortcuts. Shortcuts provide a simple way to unify data across multiple locations without duplicating or moving it. This is a big deal because it saves a LOT of time and effort that is usually involved in moving data around.

What Are Shortcuts?

Shortcuts are references (or “pointers”) to data that resides in another storage location. Instead of copying the data into Fabric, a shortcut lets you access and query it as if it were stored locally.

This is especially valuable in today’s data landscape, where data often spans OneLake, Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), Amazon S3, or other environments.

Types of Shortcuts

There are 2 types of shortcuts: table shortcuts and file shortcuts

1. Table Shortcuts
   • Point to existing tables in other Fabric workspaces or external sources.
   • Allow you to query and analyze the table without physically moving it.
2. File Shortcuts
   • Point to files (e.g., Parquet, CSV, Delta Lake) stored in OneLake or other supported storage systems.
   • Useful for scenarios where files are your system of record, but you want to use them in Fabric experiences like Power BI, Data Engineering, or Data Science.

Benefits of Shortcuts

Shortcuts is a really useful feature, and here are some of its benefits:

• No Data Duplication: Saves storage costs and avoids data sprawl.
• Single Source of Truth: Data stays in its original location while being usable across Fabric.
• Speed and Efficiency: Query and analyze external data in place, without lengthy ETL processes.
• Flexibility: Works across different storage platforms and Fabric workspaces.

How and Where Shortcuts Can Be Created

• In OneLake: You can create shortcuts directly in OneLake to link to data from ADLS Gen2, Amazon S3, or other OneLake workspaces.
• In Fabric Experiences: Whether working in Data Engineering, Data Science, Real-Time Analytics, or Power BI, shortcuts can be created in lakehouses or KQL (Kusto Query Language) databases, and you can use them directly as data in OneLake. Any Fabric service will be able to use them without copying data from the data source.
• In Workspaces: Shortcuts make it possible to connect across lakehouses stored in different workspaces, breaking down silos within an organization. The shortcuts can be generated from a lakehouse, warehouse, or KQL database.
• Note that warehouses do not support the creation of shortcuts. However, you can query data stored within other warehouses and lakehouses.

How Shortcuts Can Be Used

• Cross-Workspace Data Access: Analysts can query data in another team’s workspace without requesting a copy.
• Data Virtualization: Data scientists can work with files stored in ADLS without having to move them into Fabric.
• BI and Reporting: Power BI models can use shortcuts to reference external files or tables, enabling consistent reporting without duplication.
• ETL Simplification: Instead of moving raw files into Fabric, engineers can create shortcuts and build transformations directly on the source.

Common Scenarios

• A finance team wants to build Power BI reports on data stored by the operations team without moving the data.
• A data scientist needs access to parquet files in Amazon S3 but prefers to analyze them within Fabric.
• A company with multiple Fabric workspaces wants to centralize access to shared reference data (like customer or product master data) without replication.

In summary: Microsoft Fabric Shortcuts simplify data access across locations and workspaces. Whether table-based or file-based, they allow organizations to unify data without duplication, streamline analytics, and improve collaboration.

Here is a link to the Microsoft Learn OneLake documentation about Shortcuts. From there you will be able to explore all the Shortcut topics shown in the image below:

Thanks for reading! I hope you found this information useful.