Pass Microsoft Power Platform PL-900 Exam in First Attempt Easily

Introduction

1. Introduction

Hello and welcome to my course on PL-900, Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals. I'm Philip Burton of Foul cast Co., UK. Power Platform contains many different apps, most of which are relatively unknown but could be very useful for you and your business. In this course, we'll be having an introduction to Power Bi, PowerApps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents. We'll start off by looking at Power BI. If you have a PC, we'll download PowerBi Desktop for free and then take a look at it. Then we'll look at the power balance and see how they compare. We'll then look at power apps. We'll get a free trial and some sample data using the database that was previously known as the Common Data Service, or CDs. We then create at least one of each of the three different types of Power apps: campus, model-driven, and portals. Next up is Power Automate. We'll create several automated bugs looking at the different triggers and actions you can use. After that, we've got power. Virtual agents. We'll create a basic chat bot that can ask and answer a few questions, and then you can see how well it can perform. We'll then have a brief look at the AI builder and see how models such as the business card reader, object detection model, form processing model, and prediction model can be integrated into Power Apps and Power Automates. We'll finish off by looking at how the Power Platform can extend other business solutions, such as Dynamics 365. And we'll have some Power Platform administration and security. No prior knowledge is required. We'll even see how to get a free Power Platform trial. There are regular quizzes to help you remember the information so you know you're learning. Once you've completed this course, you will have a good introductory knowledge of the Power platform, and with some practice, you could even go for the official Microsoft Certification P 900.Wouldn't that look good on your CVO resume? So, without further ado, let's have a look at how you can use the Udemy interface, and then we'll have a look and see what you should be interested in on the Power platform.

2. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The business value of Power Platform services. Introduction

Hello and welcome to the course. And we're going to start by looking at all of the different apps that we will be using, and by doing so, we will actually be ticking off quite a few requirements for the PL-900 certification. But we'll talk about that in the next video. So in this video, we're going to have a look at the business value of these services. So, first and foremost, use Power Bi to analyze data. First of all, Power Bi is free, so you can download it for free. As we will be doing in this course, the Power BI desktop will have access to all of these different types of visualizations. We can get data from hundreds of different sources, so your source data can remain in the same area. It doesn't have to be moved just so that it can be used in Power BI. In addition, you can also have your data transformed. So if I go for a blank query and connect, you can see that we can go into the Power Query editor, and with this we're able to lay down a series of steps that we can perform to change your data using the transform tools, the add column tools, and many more. We can also connect data by using a model. So here we've got category connected, wave expenses, and a few other tables, for instance. So it's very good value in terms of the price of zero. We can also use the Power BI service, and we are able to bring our reports onto the web and then create dashboards from several different reports. And again, this starts with free. You only have to pay if you want to share it among your businesses. If you want to do more than just basically try it, it's fully featured; both of these packages are fully featured, and there is actually no price that you have to pay for PowerBI desktop. But if you want to start sharing it collaboratively, then the cost is actually quite reasonable—I think about $10 per user per month. So, with the Power Bi service, you can create projects, or workspaces as we call them, and package them up into apps that are only sent to other members of your organization. You could even post it on the internet if you wanted to. That concludes the Power Bi desktop and service. Then we're looking at power apps. Now there are three different sorts of PowerApps, and we'll be looking at them in some detail: canvasapps, model-driven apps, and portal apps. Portal apps are like a website. So looking at Canvas apps as an example, imagine having this on your mobile phone, so it is connecting to data, and here we're able to edit the data and view more details about the data. Basically, you're only limited by your imagination. So the business value of this is being able to roll out apps to many different people in your organization without it being that expensive. Now, the data that we saw is based on the data verse. This was previously known as the Common Data Service, but as of November 2020, it was renamed. So this is your own database in the cloud. So you can have tables, which can have columns (lots of different types of columns), and you can have as much data as you want. You can create views, forms, dashboards, and charts for your data. You can correct relationships among tables and correct business rules. So you can have sensible data and you can say, "Actually, this is the sort of data that I want in these tables." database is included in a Power Apps subscription. And the Power Apps subscription starts at about $10 per set of apps per month, going up to $40 for a user for unlimited apps. Now, in Power Automate, this allows you to create flaws. So these are processes. So imagine I wanted to go into Twitter every minute and look for a specific hashtag, and then we were going to create an email for each tweet with that hashtag. So instead of having 20 emails, let's say we'll combine it all into one big email. So that can be done. And there are plenty of other business users that you can think of. So imagine having something automated running in the background. Hopefully you can see how this might improve your company's productivity. And it's included in the per-user price for the Power apps, so there's no additional charge beyond that. $40 per user per month. Your data might not be in the database; it might be elsewhere, but that's okay. You don't have to have your data in Microsoft because there are over 200 different types of connectors. It could be in any data source that you can query. And if it's not one of these 200-plus connectors, no problem. You can create a custom connector, which you can use throughout your organization, or if you want to publish it, you can get it certified by Microsoft. And again, these connectors are included with your Power Apps subscription. And then finally, there's Microsoft Virtual Agents, a chatbot. So imagine being able to say, "This is the answer to your question" without actually having to have an end user. So, for example, I'm asking when my store is open, okay, but I want to buy items, so I'll be shipping to Ma, for example, and being told there's an extra charge, and then what you want to buy. So all of this can be done without your employees having to type this. And if it needs to be escalated, you can talk to an agent if you so wish. So these virtual agents can help with perhaps a more simple sort of inquiry, freeing up your employees for the more complicated ones. Now virtual agents are a lot more expensive; they start around $1,000 per month. But if you think about how much time your employees might be spending talking to customers over repetitive questions, Think how much time that could save them and free them up for other things. So this is a look at the business value of the Power Platform Services. power bi, power apps, power automate, and power virtual agents are all available. In the next video, what we're going to do is have a look at the curriculum and see what we'll be learning in the rest of this course.

3. Curriculum

As you have seen, Power Platform covers a lot of things: power virtual agents, power apps, power automate, power BI, the AI builder, and more. So what I want to do in this course is have a curriculum that gives you an introduction to all of these. Now, you'll have seen certain flaws. The Power App that we were looking at, the virtual agents, we will be using all of those as part of this course. But what is sensible? What way should we be looking at all of these items? And for me, I like to ask the expert—and the expert in this case is Microsoft. Microsoft's PL-900 exam is for you if you want to understand the capabilities of the Power Bi platform, including automating basic business processes, basic data analysis, simple Power apps, and powerful chatbots. Now, in this course, we'll be looking more at the principles behind all of this. However, I find that the best way to have a look at the principles is if you see somebody actually doing it. So that's why we'll be creating all of these things that you have seen. In addition, if you're an American student, you may be eligible for ACE accreditation. If you decide to go on and pass this examination, you will get a law degree with two credits in information technology or data science. So what do you need to know to be able to take and pass this exam? Well, let's scroll down, and we can see that the skills are measured thusly. So describe the business value of our platform. We started to do that in the previous video. Identify core components, including the database and Power Bi, Power apps, PowerAutomate, and Power virtual agents. But there is this download exam skills outline, which breaks it down into 80 or so units. So what I'm doing in this course is going through each of these individual units and seeing what we need to cover. Now, in terms of the order, the order is okayish. We've already had a look at describing the business value of these Power Platform services, but it can get a bit dry if we just start right at the beginning and work our way through. So instead, what we'll be doing is looking at Power Bi. So we start off by looking at Power Desktop, then move on to Power Biservice, then look at Power Apps. However, there's a bit of work we have to do before we can actually get into Power apps proper, and that is looking at some of the core components, especially the database. Now you may see references to the CommonData service, especially on the Internet, in articles. The CDs contain the data first. In November 2020, Microsoft decided to rename it and rename, for instance, entities as tables, fields as columns, and so forth. In this course, I'll be using both, but making sure you know pretty well which is the modern version because you will see both on the Internet. We'll also be looking at connectors because we've got to connect to various parts of the data. After that, we will be going through Power Apps and looking at canvas apps, model-driven apps, and portals. Then we'll be looking at Power Automate, and we'll be creating several floors to automate our work. We're then having a moderately quick look at Power Virtual Agents, and we'll be creating our own chat, bot, and topic. And then we'll be looking at all the rest of it. We'll be describing the AI builder fairly quickly; just one video for that. And then we'll look at administration, security, and how we can extend the business solutions by using the Power platform. What difficulty do we need to take a look at for this course? Well, for this, I've been guided by the official Microsoft practice exam as shown on Measure Up. Now, I've not taken any of the questions used in the official practice tests in this course. I believe it would be a very good idea if you took the official practice test after this course. Then, hopefully, you'll be able to be certified as a Power platform. Fundamentals. So we've got all of these 80 or so requirements. How do you know, in this course, which one you're doing? Well, coming up we're going to have a resources section, and there's going to be a few things you can download from that. and one of them is this. So this covers all of the exam requirements that we have previously seen. So, for instance, these—and I've numbered them—go from one all the way to about 80. And then in this course in the curriculum, I have numbered the lectures. So you can see at the beginning of each video in the description the numbers 36, 42, 35, and 44. Quite often I will be doing more than one topic where it makes sense, but again, very frequently I'll just be doing one. And sometimes I just need an introduction before we can actually get onto the skills that have been asked for. At the end of this course, if you go for the practice exam and you start getting fairly high marks, then you could go for the official examination and then be certified. So, coming up, we have the resources, so download the resources, and then we'll be starting on our first major topic. We'll be having a look at Power BI. Please join me there.

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Power BI Desktop – Visualizations

1. Downloading Power BI Desktop

In this part of the course, we'll be looking at Power Bi, and more specifically, Power Bi Desktop. So the first thing you need to do is install it. So Power Bi Desktop just goes to Google, and here you can see some information about it and download it for free. So I'm going to click on that button and because I've got Windows Ten, it's going to go into Microsoft Store. If you've got Windows Seven or Windows Eight, you'll probably get a download page. So I'm going to install the app. I've previously installed it, but I'm now reinstalling it for this particular course. Power Bi Desktop is a cutting-edge piece of Microsoft consumer software that is completely free and yours to keep in perpetuity. It is something that keeps getting updated month after month. So we'll be opening this. I'll pause the video very shortly so it can download. We'll be opening this. It may be that it will look a little bit different when you open it because they keep adding new features. However, the fundamentals, which are what we're looking at in this course, will be exactly the same. So I'm just going to now pause this video and wait for it to download. Right now that has been downloaded, let's click on "Launch," and that's going to now open it up on my computer so I can close everything else that I've been working on. So we start off with a screen that just says you're welcome. These are your most recent data sources or files that you've been using, and these are some resources that you might be interested in. I'm going to say no thank you to all that and just forget about this blank screen. So I just want to take the rest of the video to take a quick tour around this interface. So first of all, we've got the File menu. So this is when you can open reports, save reports, import all export content to a new file, and then publish them onto the Power Bi service. So the distinction between Power Bi Desktop and Power Biservice will be discussed in greater depth later. But the PowerBI desktop is on your computer. The Power Bi service is on the cloud; it's on the internet, and that's probably all we need. We've got this browser port If you want to open a download box and say, "Okay, this is your computer, where's everything?" then we have the most common functions in home, so we have get your data and something to do with queries. We'll have a look at transforming data later. We've got insertion, visualizations, and calculations for a new measure and a quick measure. so we'll look at measures later. Basically, a measure is anything that is numerical that you can measure, so count some averages, that sort of thing, and then you can publish it onto the Power Bi service exactly the same way as this publish button is here. Insert largely similar sorts of things. So insert a new page. So this is a page of a report, and we can have multiple pages, as we can see here, and I can get rid of them by clicking on the X. We can add new visualizations. These are also visualizations; I've just treated them separately. Now, this course is about the Power platform and one of the Power platform apps is Power apps and you can import embed into your report, a PowerApps app versus we'll be looking at Power apps later on and again, more things that you can insert. So in modeling, we won't be getting into a huge amount of discourse, and then we've got things to do with changing styles. We'll be looking at a couple of things, but in a fairly superficial way. And then there's help. So we've got these menu bars at the top, and there will be some more menu items added, just like in Excel. When you add some visualizations and click on Twitch, you will see specific ways to customize—it could be fields or other things. Now, over here on the right side, we have got three things. We've got photos, visualizations, and fields. Now, you might not be able to see them. They might all be collapsed. If you do see them collapsed, then you can uncollapse them by clicking on this greater than or less than sign. So I will generally be having these first two or the last two, depending on which way you're going. the visualizations and fields being shown throughout this course. filters, I'll only show them when I need to. Now, if you can't see the filters for any reason, then go into view and show the panel filters. But I don't think you can switch off visualizations and fields, so they'll be there all the time. And then, on the left hand side, we have got three different views: report, data, and model. And again, we'll be looking at that separately in this course. So this is a quick look at Power Desktop, which hopefully you've installed on your computer. And in the next video, we're going to have a look at how we can import data into Power BI Desktop.

2. 40. Identify available types of data sources including Microsoft Excel

In this video, we're going to look at the different types of data sources that are available for us to use in Power BI, and we're also going to create our first visualizations. So if we get data, this shows some common data sources. So you can see text and commerce separated values files from Excel, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft SQL Server analysis services. But at the bottom we've got a lot more, and that's why I'm going to look next. So, when I click on this additional dot, our get data is divided into different categories. First of all, file categories. So Excel Text CSV has comma-separated values. XML So this is Extendable Markup Language and JSON, which is JavaScript Object Notation. Both of these are used quite often on the Web. So if you're downloading web data, quite often it'll be in an XML or JSON format folder. Let's say you've got a folder full of Excel spreadsheets and you want to combine them into one big data source. Well, you can do that using folders, and it also works with subfolders as well. And then we've got other things like PDF parquet and SharePoint folders. So these are your files. And by SharePoint folder, what I mean is that you have your on-premises SharePoint, and you're pointing to a folder on your on-premises server. Then we've got databases. We've got a huge range of databases, as you might guess. So the typical Microsoft ones are first. SQL Access and SQL Server Analysis Services And then we get into Oracle and IBM. Then we have a few that can be used with Azure, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, and then a lot more. You won't need to know any of the details, just know that you can import data from databases. Power Platform, so we'll be looking at data floors, for instance, in terms of the Power Platform, and there's also something called Data Verse. Again, we'll go over that later in the course. Data verse is the new name for common data services. So, at this point, these two are nearly identical. Then we've got Azure. Azure is Microsoft's cloud offering, and so we've got lots of things to do with Azure, including Azure SQL databases. Again, you won't need to know any of the details of these. These are more covered in the AZ-900 certification than the PL-900 certification. Just know that you can use these sources as data sources. Then we've got online services. So if you've got SharePoint, not on premises but online, this is where you go. And you've got SharePoint Online lists. So that's a list of items in Microsoft Exchange Online and Dynamics 365. Much later in this course, we'll have a video specifically about dynamics and what it is. So we had Web and then SharePoint lists and things like that. Again, you won't need to know the huge detail that is behind this. Simply know that you can access data from files on your computer, including folders and SharePoint on-premises databases, via the Power platform, which includes the data verse Microsoft Azure Online services, such as SharePoint in the Cloud, SharePoint Online lists, and Dynamics 365. So these are the types of data sources that were available for use in Power BI.

3. Creating our first visualization

So let's now create our first visualization. Again, I got to this dialog box by going to "home," more dot," and I'm going to use Excel. Now, in the resources section of this course, you have a workbook. Within the workbook, we've got two spreadsheets. So, as opposed to our table HP regions spreadsheet, here is our table HP administrators. So you can see we've got dates, region names, areas, an average price index, and the twelve-month percentage change, which doesn't exist for the first year. You have to wait till there are actually twelve months before you can have a twelve-month percentage change and number of sales volume. So what this measures is house price inflation. That's the HP house price for certain administrative regions in the United Kingdom between 1995 and 2016. So we're going to use this to create our first visualization. So we go into get data all Excel. You can, of course, just go get the data in Excel (both work completely the same way) and put it in your folder. Now you should have downloaded a source data file in the resources earlier on in this video. So if you haven't, why not pause the video, go back earlier, and get this file now? So click open, and a new dialog box will come onto the screen saying, "Okay, you got this workbook; it contains spreadsheets." It may also contain Excel-formatted tables. What do you want to download? And I'm going to use the table HP admin.so I'll just check that. Now there is a transformed data section. I'm not going to do that at the moment. I'm just going to do a straightforward load. So clicking "load" And we can see data coming in. And now we have the data here in our field section. So it's exactly the same data, albeit in alphabetical order. You can see we previously listed a date and region name. Now we're starting with a twelve-month change. So let's create a visualization. And the question is, What question do we want to answer? Well, let's answer the question: how many houses were sold in each year? So I'm going to answer that question by means of a bar chart. And we've got in this visualization pane lots of different types of bar and column charts. So the one I'm going to use is a stacked-column chart. So I'll just click on it, and you can see the visualization appear. Now the visualization is selected when I have these eight little handles all around the visualization. And when it's selected, look at this visualization section. In this fields part, we have now got fields for access, legend, values, and tool tips. There will be different categories for the different items. For instance, if I were to insert a map, then again, it would be completely different. It might be asking for longitude and latitude. Now as soon as I click away from the visualization, this changes. So it's no longer selected. It's now just asking for values. And as soon as I drag any data values from fields to values, it will create its own visualization, the new one. So I'll click on this again. So what I want on the axis running across is the date. So I'm just going to drag the date into the axis and resize this visualization by clicking on the bottom right handle. You can see the mouse transform into a double arrow arrow, and I can now drag and move it. So if I drag the sides, for instance, I can move the visualization to where I want it to be. So I've got the year going across the date, going up and down. I'm going to have the sales volume, and I'm going to put that into values. So there, we can see the sales volume by here. And I'm just going to move this here. I'm going to put this so it's filling just half the page. Now I'll click away from that, and I'm going to add another visualization. And I'm going to again make this a stacked column chart, or maybe I'll make this a line chart. So I'll click that, and you can see that Power BI is intelligent. She hasn't just put it where the first one was. As a default place, it tries to fill any available space. So this time I'm going to put date in the axis going across. And you can see, by the way, we've got a new item here, secondary values. So you can see that the actual values that you have to fill in change based on the visualization. And I'm going to put the twelve-month percent change, and I'm going to put that in the values. So we have created our first visualizations. We have the total number of houses sold. So in 1995, we had about $138,000. And as you can see, if I hover over it, a tool tip appears, providing more information without cluttering the screen. So it's information on demand. So let's go back to our Excel data and just have a look at 1995. And so I'm just highlighting all the values. You can see 138,152 at the bottom of this page. So yes, that looks absolutely right. And then we have our twelve-month percentage change by year. And so for 1997, we have 300%. So let's have a look at the values for 1997. And you can see that we usually have 3-5-6. Okay, this isn't coming up to 300%. The annual change does not appear to be greater than 6.5 percent. Okay, something's gone wrong with our visualization. Actually, it hasn't. The computer has tried to interpret what you wanted, but it's got it wrong in this particular case. So in the next video, what we're going to do is look at aggregate functions and see if we can put a fix in the second visualization to make it more in line with what we expect.

4. 39. Describe and implement aggregate functions

In the previous video, we created these two visualizations, but we noted that something is really wrong with the twelve-month percentage change. By the end of the year, we had 300%, whereas the actual data suggests that it was no more than 6%, most likely 5%. So the reason for this is that the computer is doing a sum of these figures. So if I highlight these figures, you can see that the total of 300.7, which is the result we're getting from Power Bi, is really what we want and probably closer to the 4.2 figure of the average. So what are average count, numerical count, minmax, and sum? These are technically known as aggregations. So they summarize the data into numerical figures. So if you've got tax, for instance, then the only aggregation we can really use is count. If you've got dates, then we could have an average date, but that doesn't really make that much sense. For dates, we could have a first date, a last date, or a summer date. This really does not make any sense whatsoever. As you can see, the range of aggregations we have varies greatly depending on the type of data. Equally, it may not make sense to do something like calculate the average price. So even though this is numerical data, some might just not make sense. An average is probably a bit better than the average price. So let's see how we can change this aggregation from the sum of twelve months' percentage change to an average. And there are two different ways. First of all, we can change it in this one particular visualization, and to do that, we go back to our field section and in our values, we click on the drop-down here, the little arrow. And here we can change our graduation from sum to average. So for those more mathematically inclined, this is the mean average. So if I click on that, you can see that we've now resolved our problem. We've now got an average of 4.2%. We've also got minimum, maximum, and sum counts as the number of values. So this will be the case each and every year. But then we've also got account distinct, so these are different values. So in 1995, we just had the one value, which was blank. As a result, the number of distinct values is one, just the blank, the number of count. Well, each of these is an individual item, so 12345. But in terms of distinct items, this is one item; this is a repetition, so it doesn't count. Again, this is another repetition. As a result, this is one. We've also got standard deviation and variance for those of you who use those things. If you don't use the standard deviation of variances, don't worry about them at all. And then we've got median, and median is the value in the middle. So if we arrange everything in numerical order, it's the middle value. It can get a bit more complicated when there's an even number of values, but let's just ignore that for now. So the average is what we want here. Now if I just delete this visualization, so I've highlighted it, you can see that all of these eight handles are done. Simply delete, and if I create a new visualization, I will enter the date in Access and the percentage change over a year. As you can see, we've returned to summer. So let's say we don't want that. We want any new visualizations that are going to be created to be created using average as a default. and we do that by going to the fields pane here. And I need to select this twelve-month percentage change. Now I don't want to check this box. If I do that, it will create a new visualization based on that. and you just click on the words and look at what we've got here. We've got two new menus: table tools and column tools. Column Tools is the one I particularly want to look at. In the Properties section, we have the default summarization of your aggregation. And so I'm going to change this from sum to average. Now if you've got an older version of PowerBI, you may find this in the modeling section. But I'm going to assume that you just downloaded your Power Bi desktop at the beginning of this course. So now it gives me an average summarization as the default. So if I now create a new line graph and I put in my date and my 12% month change, you can see that we now have an average. We can check the average by clicking on this drop-down menu, and we can see that Average has this check mark right next to it. So aggregations are measures. Measures are usually numerical values, sometimes dates or date-time values. So day wave time can be summarized using some averages (min, max), counting not blanks, counting distinct, and then standard deviation, variance, and median. This summarization is technically known as "aggregating," and you can count text and date data, and you can also use the min-max or first-last aggregations as well. But it's generally used for numbers. So you will be required to take the exam. To know what the aggregations are, you actually need to know how to change them. But I find it a lot easier with these courses if I actually just show you how to change them. You change them in two places. Click on this drop-down and go to "Average," or select the field and go to "Column Tools" and change the summarization there.

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