- [Instructor] I would like to start
by talking a little bit about the certification itself
and what you should expect from the exam,
and therefore, this course.
Microsoft tends to follow somehow consistent convention
when it comes to naming their exams,
which helps you in understanding
what to expect in terms of knowledge area
and level of difficulty.
If this is not the first course you're watching
from me on this learning path,
you can safely skip the next two slides on this video.
Microsoft has three main certification levels:
fundamentals, associate and expert.
They also have a specialty level,
but it's for very specific workloads such as IoT
or SAP on Azure.
So let's focus on the three main categories for now.
First, we have the fundamentals level with exams
that generally end with 900, such as PL-900
or the AZ-900.
You can expect the certifications to be quite entry-level
and cover just general concepts without digging much
on the technical details.
Then we have the associate certifications
such as our PL-300.
The number here is a bit more flexible,
but most of them and with 100 or 200
such as DP-203 and AI-102.
These exams are for professionals
with around two years of experience on the product,
so they are far more technical than the fundamental ones.
Finally, we have the export level certifications
such as Azure DevOps Engineer, Exam AZ-400,
and Azure Solutions Architect, Exam AZ-305.
These exams have the highest level of technical difficulty
and corresponding prestige.
The prefix also matters as it defines the area of knowledge.
For example, PL for the power platform,
AI for artificial intelligence, or AZ for Azure in general.
The PL-300 pretty much matches these definitions.
As with most other Microsoft exams on the 300 level,
the PL-300 is more hands-on,
showing you how to work with the product.
I won't be covering more elementary data concepts here,
but that shouldn't make it difficult for you
to follow along in any way.
There are around 10 different topics for the exam,
such as connectors, data modeling, dax,
reports, dashboards, apps, workspaces, and datasets.
You can see the full contents for the exam on this link.
The questions are quite well distributed
among the subjects, so it's important
that you have a good understanding on most of them.
That being said, this is not an architecture level exam,
so most of the content is focused on Power BI itself.
You might see a few questions about the ecosystem
around the product such as SQL Server,
Dynamics or the dataverse.
However, most of these are just related to connectors
and relatively simple to answer.
I have designed this content
to match these exam requirements.
First of all, this course covers two topics
of the PL-300 outline, both of which
having a similar weight on the exam.
The first one is identify patterns and trends,
which covers how to perform advanced data analysis
on Power BI, including the use of AI visuals.
The other one is enhanced reports for usability
and storytelling, which addresses navigation
and user experience features such as mobile views,
visual interactions, tool tips, and bookmarks.
For most of this course, we'll be working
with Power BI desktop.
However, as we'll spend a good amount of time
on this learning path working with the cloud service,
you might need the Power BI Pro license for it.
If you don't have one though, Microsoft allows you
to sign up for a 30-day trial of the product.
I'll also be performing some demos
to illustrate the concepts taught.
There are PBIX files available as part of the exercises,
so you should be able to follow along
on your own environment
and it's recommended that you do so
as having hands-on experience
will help you better understand
and memorize all the concepts.
And what kind of knowledge do you need to bring?
Well, as this material focuses
on more advanced reporting topics,
I won't be covering the basics
of setting up a report or a visual.
For that you might want to check
Creating reports in Power BI from Joshua Rischin,
which is also part of this learning path.
With that out of the way, let's get started.