PL-300: Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst

700 PL-300 practice test questions with explanations that teach the concept, never the answer. Per-domain analytics and Exam Coach AI. 70% to pass.

700 practice questions for PL-300, Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst, matched to the April 2026 objectives across Power Query, DAX, report design and workspace security. Every explanation teaches the distinction the question turned on.

PL-300 is the exam behind Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst Associate, and it is the certification most working analysts reach for first. It measures what you do in the product: connecting to sources and shaping them in Power Query, building a model that answers questions correctly, designing reports people can read, and publishing and securing the result. This bank holds 700 questions written to the objectives as revised on 20 April 2026, spread across the four skill areas in the same proportions Microsoft publishes.

What is covered:

  1. Prepare the data - 189 questions. Connecting to sources and choosing between Direct Lake, DirectQuery and Import. Query folding and what silently breaks it. Profiling with column quality, distribution and profile, including why the default sample is not the whole table. Merging and appending, join kinds, pivot and unpivot, data types and the locale trap that turns March into April. Parameters, dataflows, incremental refresh and privacy levels.
  2. Model the data - 189 questions. Star schema against snowflake, cardinality, cross-filter direction, and the inactive relationships a role-playing date dimension needs. Row context, filter context and context transition, which is where most DAX confusion actually lives. CALCULATE and the filter-clearing family, iterators, variables, time intelligence, semi-additive measures and calculation groups. Performance work with Performance Analyzer and DAX query view, and the cardinality reduction that makes a model smaller.
  3. Visualize and analyze the data - 203 questions. Choosing a visual and configuring it, themes, conditional formatting and visual calculations. Bookmarks, the Selection pane, buttons, drillthrough, custom tooltips and sync slicers. Accessibility, mobile layout, export settings and automatic page refresh. The analysis surface: Analyze features, grouping and binning, reference lines and forecasting, anomaly detection, key influencers and the decomposition tree. Copilot appears here as the objectives now place it, including creating a narrative visual and generating a report page.
  4. Manage and secure Power BI - 119 questions. Workspaces and their roles, apps and audience groups, dashboards and distribution. Subscriptions and data alerts, endorsement, gateways and scheduled refresh. Then the security half: item-level access, semantic model permissions, row-level security roles and group membership, and sensitivity labels.

Written as a product exam, not a theory exam:

PL-300 asks what a specific feature does and when you would choose it over the neighboring one. It rarely asks for a definition. The questions here are built the same way, from the documentation for the feature under test rather than from a summary of it, and a large share of them turn on a behavior you only meet by using the product: that a bookmark replays its captured filters unless you turn Data off, that a report page tooltip on a line chart shows every series at once, that row-level security applies to a Viewer and to nobody above them.

The preparation that fails on this exam is memorizing feature lists. Candidates who have watched the material but not opened Power BI Desktop lose marks on exactly the questions above, because each one is a default that must be observed rather than recalled.

Explanations that teach the topic:

Every question carries an explanation that names the distinction the question turned on and the boundary where a different choice would have been right. None of them restates the winning option. That matters more than it sounds: an explanation saying "the answer is a star scheme because a star schema is correct here" has taught you nothing you can carry to a question you have not seen.

Where a question depends on a documented limit or a default, the explanation says which document that came from and which objective it sits under, so a claim you doubt is a claim you can check.

Questions that show the expression:

PL-300 reads DAX and M rather than only naming them, and the April 2026 revision added DAX query view to the performance objective. 66 questions here present an expression - a measure, a filter argument, a security rule, a Power Query step - and ask what it returns or why it behaves as it does. That is the format candidates most often report being unprepared for, because a bank written only from the objective bullets never shows one.

Exam Coach AI, besides every question:

Exam Coach AI sits beside the question while you work. Ask it what a feature does, how two things you keep mixing up differ, or when you would choose one over the other, and it explains the concept. It will not tell you which option to pick, and that is deliberate - the explanation is what must hold up in the exam room, not the answer.

Coming from PL-300 to DP-600:

PL-300 and DP-600 overlap more than their titles suggest, and the overlap has grown rather than shrunk. DP-600, Fabric Analytics Engineer, assumes from its first objective that you can already build a semantic model, write DAX that behaves correctly under a filter, and reason about which storage mode a table should use. It does not teach any of that. It extends it into lakehouses, warehouses and Direct Lake on scale, and into the engineering questions that follow once a model is shared across an organization rather than owned by one analyst.

Direct Lake is the seam. It now appears in the PL-300 objectives as a third option in the storage-mode choice, beside DirectQuery and Import, which means a PL-300 candidate already must know what it is and when it applies. In DP-600 that same feature becomes a substantial part of the exam. The modeling work you do here is most of the foundation that one builds on, and candidates who take the two in the other order usually report going back to relearn the DAX.

If you are choosing where to start, start here. PL-300 is the certification that proves you can do the analyst job; DP-600 is the one that proves you can do it on somebody else's platform, at a scale where the decisions cost money. Our DP-600 bank is built to the same standard as this one, and the two share enough vocabulary that the second exam is a genuinely shorter run-up than the first.

How it is marked:

Each sitting draws 60 questions from the pool of 700 and marks them out of 100. The pass mark is 70 percent of the questions you were asked. Your result breaks down by skill area, so a marginal pass tells you which of the four areas cost you the marks rather than only that it was close, and a comfortable pass still shows you where the weak quarter is.

Because each sitting is drawn from a pool more than ten times its size, repeating the exam tests you rather than your memory of the order. That is the difference between a bank you can exhaust in an afternoon and one you can still be learning from in the week before the real thing. Questions you get wrong are collected for review, so the second pass through a weak area starts from your own mistakes rather than from the beginning.

Free preview:

PL-300 practice test 40 questions are free, and they are spread across all four skill areas rather than taken from the front of the bank - eleven each from the three larger areas and seven from workspace management and security. That spread is deliberate: a preview drawn from one domain tells you nothing about how the rest was written.

It is enough to see everything that distinguishes the paid bank. You get the explanation style, including the ones that name the boundary where the other option would have been right. You get the questions that show a DAX or M expression rather than describing it. And you get the per-domain result at the end, which is the thing most competing banks do not give you at any price. Decide from that rather than from this page.

Explore PrepifyLabs

Certification practice exams

Insights and case studies

The most advanced examination and certification readiness platform available. Train autonomously, pass effortlessly.

Prepifylabs LLC, 5900 Balcones Drive STE 38508, Austin, TX 78731, United States