How to create a OneLake shortcut in Microsoft Fabric

João Barros 06 de July de 2026 4 min read

A shortcut in OneLake is a reference that points to data stored somewhere else — such as an Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 account or an Amazon S3 bucket — and makes it appear inside your Lakehouse in Microsoft Fabric without copying it. This avoids duplicating files, saves storage, and means you always work with the most up-to-date version of the data. When you create a shortcut in OneLake, your Lakehouse queries that external folder as if the files were local.

Prerequisites

An active Fabric capacity (trial, F SKU, or Premium per capacity) and permission to create items in a workspace.
A Lakehouse already created in the workspace — or permission to create one.
Access to the data source: for example, an ADLS Gen2 account with a container and its authentication method.
The DFS URL of the storage account, in the format https://<account>.dfs.core.windows.net/<container>.

Step 1: Open the Lakehouse where you will create the shortcut

In your Microsoft Fabric workspace, open the Lakehouse where you want the external data to appear. In the Lakehouse explorer on the left you will see two areas: Tables (Delta-format tables) and Files (files in any format). A shortcut can be created in either one. If you do not have a Lakehouse yet, click New item in the workspace and choose Lakehouse.

Step 2: Start creating the shortcut

Hover over Files (or Tables), click the three dots ... or right-click, and select New shortcut. Alternatively, use Get data → New shortcut on the Lakehouse ribbon. A window opens asking for the data source.

Step 3: Choose the data source

The window shows the available sources. For data that already lives inside Fabric, choose Microsoft OneLake. For external data, pick the right connector — the most common are Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and Amazon S3, but Google Cloud Storage and Dataverse are also available, among others. In this example, select Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2.

Step 4: Configure the connection and the path

Enter the account's DFS URL and create (or reuse) a connection. Choose the authentication method — Organizational account, Account key, SAS, or service principal — and fill in the credentials inside Fabric; never put them in plain text outside the platform.

URL:             https://vendasglobais.dfs.core.windows.net/dados
Authentication:  Organizational account (or Account key / SAS / Service principal)

Once the connection is validated, browse the folder tree and pick the subfolder you want to expose — for example dados/vendas-externas. Give the shortcut a clear name and click Create.

Step 5: Query the shortcut data

The shortcut now appears as a normal folder under Files (or as a table under Tables). In a notebook, you can read it with Spark:

# Read the shortcut files in a Fabric notebook
df = spark.read.option("header", True).csv("Files/vendas-externas/2026.csv")
df.show(5)

If the shortcut is under Tables in Delta format, you can also query it in T-SQL through the Lakehouse SQL analytics endpoint:

SELECT TOP 10 pais, total_vendas
FROM vendas_externas
ORDER BY total_vendas DESC;

Verify the result

To confirm everything worked: the shortcut shows a small link (arrow) icon in the Lakehouse explorer; clicking it shows the source files or rows with no copy involved; and a simple query returns data. Do a final test: change a file in the source (ADLS Gen2), query again, and confirm you see the change — proof that you are reading the data in its original location, not a copy.

Conclusion

You have just created a shortcut in OneLake that links your Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse to external data without duplicating it — the foundation of a simpler, always-current data architecture. From here you can combine several shortcuts in the same Lakehouse, apply the Medallion architecture on top of them, or build a Direct Lake semantic model. Which data source in your organization would make the most sense to connect through a shortcut instead of copying it?