Enterprise data platforms are really good at one thing: creating copies of the same data everywhere. Different teams copy the same curated folders into their own lakehouses, then copy again into another workspace "for reporting," then again for a data science sandbox. Storage grows, pipelines multiply, and nobody is sure which copy is the source of truth anymore.
Microsoft Fabric Shortcuts give us a way out of that pattern by letting a Fabric Lakehouse reference data where it already lives instead of copying it again. You still get a first-class experience in the Lakehouse, SQL endpoint, and Power BI, but the bytes stay in one place.
What Are Microsoft Fabric Shortcuts?
In plain terms, a shortcut in Microsoft Fabric is a logical link that points from your Lakehouse (or other Fabric item) to some other storage location. In the Lakehouse explorer it looks like a regular folder or table, but the data is actually being read from the target location.
Supported shortcut targets today include:
