How to Use Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric: A Quick Start Guide

[bhanu_gautam]

If you’re diving into Microsoft Fabric, you’ve likely heard about its powerful capabilities for unified analytics. One of its standout features? Notebooks. Whether you’re coming from a data science, engineering, or BI background, notebooks provide a flexible space to explore, transform, and visualize data — all within the Fabric ecosystem.

In this guide, we’ll walk through how to get started with Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric — from creating your first notebook to running code and visualizing results. No fluff, just a practical walkthrough to help you hit the ground running.

 

Step 1: Enable Fabric Capacity

First, ensure that Fabric Capacity is enabled in your Admin Portal. This is essential to use Fabric features, including Notebooks.

Step 2: Create a New Workspace
Go to My Workspace and click on “+ New workspace”.

Enter a name and optional description for your workspace.

In the License mode, select either Trial or Fabric Capacity.(I’m selecting Trial since I’m using the free version.)

Step 3: Create a New Notebook

Inside your workspace, click on “+ New” and select Notebook.

This will open a blank notebook for you to start working with.

Step 4: Explore the Notebook Interface

The notebook is now ready to use. You can perform:

• Data Engineering

Analytics

Data Science
All within a single environment!

Step 5: Add Data to the Notebook

• Click on “Add Items”.
• You’ll get two options:
• New Lakehouse

Existing data sources

Since I already have a Lakehouse, I’ll select “Existing”.

Step 6: Connect to Lakehouse

Choose your Lakehouse and click “Connect”.

Once connected, you’ll be able to see your tables and other data assets directly in the notebook.

Step 7: Run Your First Query

I will write my first query to view the data by creating a Spark data frame using PySpark, I can select any language out of 4 Python, Scala, R and SQL to query or do analysis

Why Use Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric?

Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric bring the best of both worlds — code-first flexibility and low-code data integration — into a single, unified workspace. Whether you’re performing data cleaning, exploratory analysis, or even building machine learning models, notebooks offer the freedom and power to do it all in one place.

Some benefits include:

• Seamless integration with Lakehouse architecture
• Ability to use multiple languages (Python, SQL, R, Scala)
• Built-in collaboration and version control
• Perfect for data engineers, analysts, and scientists alike

  If you’re already familiar with notebooks from Jupyter or Databricks, the transition to Microsoft Fabric is smooth — and if you’re new, it’s a great place to start!