Microsoft Certified Data Analyst Associate Cheat Sheet 2026

The 30 highest-yield Microsoft Certified Data Analyst Associate facts, distilled from real exam questions. Print it, save it as a PDF, or study it here — free, no sign-up.

1. In Power BI, what does the 'Spotlight' feature do when activated from a visual's context menu? → It focuses attention on one visual by dimming all other visuals on the report page
2. In Dynamics 365 Sales, what is the standard pipeline stage that comes immediately after a Lead is qualified? → Opportunity
3. Which Power BI visual type is best for showing how a value changes over a continuous time period? → Line chart
4. What is the Decomposition Tree visual in Power BI primarily designed for? → Breaking down a metric across multiple dimensions interactively to identify contributors
5. What is the purpose of 'data masking' in Azure SQL Database? → Hiding sensitive data from non-privileged users by showing obfuscated values
6. What is the primary advantage of using columnar storage format (like Parquet) over row-based storage for analytical workloads? → Efficient compression and faster reads when querying only specific columns
7. In Power BI, what is the purpose of a 'gateway'? → To enable scheduled refresh of on-premises data sources
8. Which component of Azure Synapse Analytics allows you to query files directly in Azure Data Lake without loading data into a database? → Serverless SQL pool
9. When using Azure Synapse Analytics serverless SQL pool, how are you billed? → Per terabyte of data processed by queries
10. What is the purpose of Row-Level Security (RLS) in Power BI? → To restrict data access for specific users based on roles
11. What SQL clause should be used to copy every row from one table to another? → SELECT - INTO
12. A report has a slicer for 'Year' and a bar chart. You want the chart to ignore the slicer filter. What should you configure? → Edit interactions and set the slicer to have no filter on the chart
13. Which DAX function returns the number of rows in a table or the number of non-blank values in a column? → COUNTROWS
14. Which Power BI service feature enables automatic page refresh at a defined interval for real-time data monitoring? → Automatic page refresh
15. What kind of database would work best for an organizational chart? → graph
16. Which Power BI visual type is best suited for displaying trends over a continuous time period? → Line chart
17. What does publishing a Power BI report from Desktop to the Service do? → Uploads the report and its dataset to a Power BI workspace
18. A Power BI dataset refresh fails because credentials for the data source have expired. Where in Power BI Service do you update them? → Dataset Settings > Data source credentials
19. Which aggregation function in Power BI would you use to count only the distinct values in a column? → DISTINCTCOUNT
20. In Power BI, which DAX function returns the value of the last non-blank row in a column? → LASTNONBLANK
21. Which Power BI service feature allows you to schedule a dataset refresh up to 48 times per day? → Incremental refresh
22. In Power BI Service, what is a 'workspace'? → A collaborative environment where teams can create, share, and manage Power BI content
23. Automatically scaling a program to make sure it has the resources required to satisfy user demands is an example of . → Elasticity
24. In Power BI, Row-Level Security (RLS) is defined using which language? → DAX filter expressions
25. Which Dynamics 365 app would an organization use to manage the full lifecycle of a consulting engagement, including resource scheduling and time entry? → Dynamics 365 Project Operations
26. What does the 'Is Hidden' property do when applied to a table or column in Power BI? → Hides it from the Fields pane in report view but keeps it in the model
27. What does the EARLIER function do in DAX? → References an outer row context within a nested row context iteration
28. Which Azure service is best suited for storing and querying large volumes of semi-structured JSON documents? → Azure Cosmos DB
29. How can you reference a parameter in a Power Query M expression? → By typing the parameter name directly as a value in the expression
30. What does the CALCULATE function do in DAX? → Evaluates an expression in a modified filter context