Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Exam Guide

Microsoft Power BI is the world's leading business intelligence application, essential for transforming complex organizational data into clear, actionable reports and visual dashboards. This book is a practical guide that teaches you how to create a Power BI report from start to finish, and create compelling and insightful reports and dashboards. This comprehensive guide is your practical, start-to-finish roadmap to prepare you for the official PL-300 Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst Associate exam.

You will build a thorough understanding of the end-to-end data lifecycle, starting by architecting robust solutions with foundational dimensional modelling and optimal star schema design, combined with understanding licensing models. You will build the high-performance semantic model by defining proper relationships and writing powerful analytical DAX queries, including CALCULATE and context switching. The guide then teaches you how to design compelling and insightful reports before concluding with the necessary skills to ensure scalability with aggregation tables and incremental refresh, manage security, and deploy to the Power BI service app.

Upon completion, you will possess a professional, complete understanding of the entire Power BI process. This resource provides the technical competency and confidence needed to successfully attempt the PL-300 certification exam, and use proper security and configure the Power BI service.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
● Power BI components, data warehousing, and licensing models.
● Use Power Query to prepare data using M-code.
● Create scalable Power BI semantic models.
● Write powerful analytical DAX queries utilizing CALCULATE and context switching.
● Design effective and interactive Power BI reports.
● Publish reports and manage Power BI workspaces.
● Implement and setup Power BI security.
● Create and design interactive Power BI apps.
● Configure and monitor the Power BI service.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
This book is ideal for anyone aiming to create insightful reports and analyze data using Power BI. It targets data analysts, data engineers, and professionals in fields like finance, accounting, and supply chain who work directly with data.

1. Introduction to Data and Power BI
2. Dimensional Modeling
3. The Basics of Power Query
4. The Basics of Visualizations
5. Advanced Techniques of Power Query
6. Create Interactive Reports
7. The Basics of Semantic Models
8. DAX
9. Advanced DAX Concepts
10. Scalable Power BI Solutions
11. Security
12. Working with the Power BI Service
13. CreateApp
14. Monitor Power BI and Fabric
15. Copilot in Power BI
16. Practice Exam

Peter ter Braake is currently working as an independent Microsoft data platform professional. He studied physics at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Quickly after graduating, he went into IT and found his passion to be data. He became a Microsoft Certified Teacher (MCT) in 2002. This was also the time that he became Microsoft Certified. His first certification was Microsoft Certified Database Administrator: Microsoft SQL Server 2000. He has kept his Microsoft certifications up to date ever since. He was a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) for a couple of years.

Currently, Peter works a lot with Microsoft Fabric as a data engineer, Power BI as a data analyst, and Azure Machine Learning as a data scientist.

As an MCT, he teaches a lot of courses at various training providers and on-site for his customers. These courses can be official Microsoft courses or customized courses that target specific goals for their customers.

As a consultant, Peter helps his customers with advice on various data-related issues. These are often design or performance issues.