Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst Associate (Exam PL-300) Study Guide

Microsoft states you will have 100 minutes to complete the assessment. It is proctored and may include interactive components.

700 or greater on Microsoft's scaled range. That is a scaled cut score, not a percentage of questions answered correctly.

Microsoft does not publish a count for PL-300. Any specific figure you see quoted is third-party estimate, not an official number.

Prepare the data 25-30%, Model the data 25-30%, Visualize and analyze the data 25-30%, and Manage and secure Power BI 15-20%, as of the 20 April 2026 skills update.

Associate exams such as PL-300 typically cost US$165, priced by the country or region where the exam is proctored, and local taxes may apply.

Every 12 months. Microsoft associate certifications expire annually and renew free by passing an online assessment on Microsoft Learn.

24 hours after the first attempt. Waiting periods for later retakes are longer and vary.

When the source is too large to load or must be current at report time. Import gives faster queries but only shows data as of the last refresh.

A narrow fact table joined one-to-many to descriptive dimension tables. It compresses better and filters faster than a flattened table that repeats attributes on every transaction row.

A calculated column is computed row by row at refresh and stored in the model; a measure is evaluated at query time in filter context and stores nothing. Prefer measures unless you need the value for slicing or relationships.

It evaluates an expression under a modified filter context. Almost every non-trivial measure — year to date, prior year, share of total, ignore a slicer — is built this way.

Create the second relationship as inactive and activate it inside a measure with USERELATIONSHIP in CALCULATE. Only one relationship between two tables can be active at a time.

Because a measure is recomputed in each cell's filter context, including the total row. The total is total numerator over total denominator, not the sum of row ratios.

One that sums correctly across some dimensions but not across time, such as an inventory or account balance. Use point-in-time DAX like LASTDATE or the closing-balance functions.

DIVIDE performs a safe division that returns blank or a supplied alternate result when the denominator is zero, avoiding infinity and error values in visuals.

A contiguous calendar with every date present, which time intelligence functions require. A fact table only contains dates on which transactions happened, so gaps break the calculations.

They are the reserved date-time parameters that define an incremental refresh policy's partition range, so only recent partitions are refreshed on a very large table.

Remove unused columns, especially high-cardinality ones like timestamps and GUIDs that compress poorly. Adding calculated columns makes the problem worse, not better.

Applying reusable logic — year to date, prior year, percentage change — to whatever measure the user selects, instead of authoring a time variant of every measure in the model.

Drillthrough navigates to a detail page carrying the selected row's context. A bookmark restores a saved report state — filters, selection, visibility, sort — usually behind a button.

Whether a selection in one visual filters, highlights, or does nothing to each other visual on the same page. It is set per pair of visuals.

Create a field parameter listing the measures and put it in a slicer. The visual then displays whichever field the user selects, without duplicating visuals.

Setting tab order for keyboard navigation and adding meaningful alt text to visuals. Never rely on color alone to distinguish series.

RLS applies a DAX filter in the model and maps users to roles, so restricted rows never reach the client. A report filter only changes what is shown and can be worked around.

Assign users or security groups to the role in the Power BI service. A role defined in Desktop filters nobody until it has members.

Whenever the service must reach a data source inside a private network — for scheduled refresh of an imported model or for DirectQuery against on-premises data.

Publish a Power BI app from the workspace. Adding everyone as a workspace Member would grant editing rights instead of read-only access.

Endorsement (Promoted or Certified) signals quality and trust; Certified is restricted to designated reviewers. A sensitivity label signals confidentiality and persists into exported files.

Creating new reports and other content from an existing shared semantic model — the permission that makes one governed model serve many downstream reports.

A data alert fires when a dashboard card, gauge, or KPI tile crosses a threshold. A subscription emails a rendered report snapshot on a schedule you define.

Open Lineage view for the workspace. It maps sources, dataflows, semantic models, reports, and dashboards and the dependencies between them.

Run Performance Analyzer, copy that visual's DAX query, and run it in DAX query view to see whether the cost is in the query or in rendering.

Query folding sends supported transformations to the data source. Support depends on the connector and operation; a disabled View Native Query menu alone is not a universal test. In Power Query Online, inspect the optimized query plan to distinguish remote operators from those evaluated by the Power Query engine.