Don't miss your chance to take exam DP-600 or DP-700 on us!
Request nowLearn from the best! Meet the four finalists headed to the FINALS of the Power BI Dataviz World Championships! Register now
The documentation here suggests that it is possible to connect to Azure Synapse Analytics via a service principal.
But I do not see the option to do that on PowerBI Desktop
How can I connect without using account-based authentication?
Use Windows auth ?
@lbendlin I cannot use Windows Auth, Basic, or Organizational account flows for my use case. How do I connect using service principal?
Hi,
Thanks for the solution @lbendlin provided, and i want to offer some more information for user to refer to.
hello @ravsodhi, based on your description, in Power BI Desktop, it cannot use the service principal for authentication directly, if you want to use this, you consider to use web connector, then set the token as a paramater to be used in power query, you can refer to the following link.
Connect with Power BI to the Power BI REST API with a Service Principal – PBI Guy (pbi-guy.com)
Best Regards!
Yolo Zhu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.
Share feedback directly with Fabric product managers, participate in targeted research studies and influence the Fabric roadmap.
Check out the February 2026 Power BI update to learn about new features.