Brilliant! How to get started with Fabric with a Hotmail account

Hector Sven

Hector Sven

— 2 min read
Brilliant! How to get started with Fabric with a Hotmail account

Introduction

Sometimes the most interesting discoveries come from helping others. You see, couple of weeks back I started to contribute to the Fabric Community, in the Fabric Platform forums I came across this question ...

"I created a personal Azure account with Hotmail.com and added a Fabric Administrator user, but when I try to start the Fabric 60-day trial, it says the tenant doesn’t allow it. What should I do?"

And I realized... that's brilliant 💡! Indeed, you can’t create a Fabric tenant directly from a Hotmail account, but with a little creativity (and a few Azure tricks), it's perfectly possible! In this article, I will show you how 😉

Setting the Stage

When you sign up for Microsoft Fabric, the service expects a work or school account, not a personal one like Hotmail, so, when people try to activate Fabric using a Hotmail account, the setup fails

🪄
But here’s the trick! You can use your Hotmail account to create a new Tenant (Microsoft Entra ID), then, inside that tenant, you can create an organizational user — and that’s the one Fabric recognizes as a valid work account!

Solution

This is the exact procedure I did, so I know it works ... I would STRONGLY suggest you use Microsoft Edge explorer.

Step 1. Create a new Hotmail account
If you don’t want to reuse your existing one, go to outlook.com and create a new Hotmail account — for example, username@hotmail.com

🤔
Can I use an existing Hotmail account? Absolutely! Just adjust the steps accordingly.

Step 2. Create a new Azure tenant
Go to portal.azure.com and sign in using username@hotmail.com.
You’ll be asked to set up a new Tenant (Microsoft Entra ID).
Once done, it will create a domain like this usernamehotmail.onmicrosoft.com.

Step 3. Create a new organizational user
Still logged in as username@hotmail.com, go to Microsoft Entra ID → Users → New user and create a new user such as fabricadmin@usernamehotmail.onmicrosoft.com.

Assign this new user two roles:

  • Global Administrator
  • Microsoft Fabric Administrator

Step 4. Sign in with your new user
Now log in to portal.azure.com as fabricadmin@usernamehotmail.onmicrosoft.com.
Complete MFA if prompted and wait a few minutes for everything to sync.

Step 5. Launch Microsoft Fabric
Go to app.fabric.microsoft.com and sign in with your fabricadmin@usernamehotmail.onmicrosoft.com user, this will initialize your Fabric service within your new tenant.

Step 6. Wait a bit
After you log in, give it around 30 minutes for all backend services to provision.
(Yes, patience is part of the process.)

Step 7. Start your 60-day trial
Once provisioning is complete, go back to Fabric, click Start trial ... you now have a fully functional Fabric tenant created indirectly from a Hotmail account.

Call to Action

Have you tried setting up Fabric using a personal account?
Did you find any other creative tricks along the way?
Drop a comment or question — I’d love to hear your experience!

And if you found this guide helpful, share it with others in the Fabric community — it might save someone a few hours of confusion.

Read more