HOW TO PASS MICROSOFT POWER BI DA100 EXAM
Study Exam Skills Outline
First thing first. You should study this guideline published by Microsoft. It has exam skills outline. I did not take the instructor-led paid courses. Instead, I did the online free version, studied the 6 modules and I also did the lab where you can practice.
Take Online Courses
I found an online course led by Phillip Burton particularly useful too. The course is organized by a few big sessions which makes it easy to navigate and locate if you want to relearn a specific module. The course is around 20 dollars, and you can re-watch it as many times as you want.
Take Instructor-Led Lessons
I took a training course offered by Victoria Training Center. The course was pretty good and led by an Microsoft professional. Training is important, doing homework is even more essential. what is good about Victoria Training Center is that it offers students Coop opportunities where students can work on a Power BI projects with other students and with the help of a teacher.
Mock Exams
Now that you have some basics, you need to think about the exam. I personally tried to find some good exam questions in Udemy. It is cheap, ranging from 20 dollars to 60 dollars. However, the quality is not good. Luckily, I found a website called measure up. The original price is about 99 dollars. Occasionally, it offers discounts. I got the 20% discount and some other people got 30% discount. The outstanding thing that Measureup offers is the explanation for each question. Usually, each question has around 3-5 links that you can click to learn the subject and topic deeper. The explanation states why one answer is correct and at the same time, why other answers are not correct). There are total of 147 questions, it is close to 3 set of exam questions. When I took the exam, it has 57 questions.
Practice
The other key element is to PRACTICE. It is good to know the theories by the eyes and ears, but you will only master the skills when you use your brains and hands frequently. After you install Power BI desktop and sign up for office 365 E3, you can start to practice and create your fancy reports.
Read Books
DAX is the language that you will also need to know to use Power BI. I bought a book called “supercharge Power BI” written by Matt Allington. This is an incredibly good book to start with. I like the style of writer and he explains things very clearly, especially the filter propagation, and some commonly used DAX functions. The bad news is that when I took the exam, I found the DAX functions exam tests are a bit more difficult than what this book is teaching. However, I still recommend exam takers to have this book. I would say DAX functions consists of 15% of all exam questions.
Read Online Articles and YouTube study videos.
While I prepared my exam, I also found this link helpful because it is organized by exam skills outline.
Wish You Success
Finally, I wish you all pass the exam and put this certification into your resume and find your dream job and career in data science.
When I prepared my exam, I happened to watch a TV series called the last Airbender, in which people are skilled in mastering the 4 basic elements of the universe. Those people are called airbender, waterbender, firebender, and earthbender. I believe once you master the PowerBI, you can or we can call ourselves DATABENDER, who master the skills of data gathering, transformation, manipulation, and presentation.
