5. Manage and Secure Power BI (15–20%)
A finished report on your laptop delivers no value until the right people can open it, trust it, see current data in it, and see only the data they're entitled to. This phase covers the Power BI service side of the pipeline: creating workspaces, publishing and distributing content, keeping data refreshed (5.1), and securing and governing every item (5.2). It's the smallest domain by weight, but its rules are crisp and predictable, which makes it the easiest place on the exam to collect points. Read each stem by asking: who needs to do what with this content, and what's the least privilege that lets them?
Why it matters: without the right role or permission, a published report either fails to reach its audience or exposes data it shouldn't. Think of this phase as the shipping and security desk at the end of the pipeline: it decides who receives the content, how fresh it is, and what each person may see.
⚠️ Exam Trap: The Contributor role and above bypass row-level security, so giving report readers an editing role to solve an access problem silently removes their row filters.
