Microsoft Certified: Power Platform Fundamentals (PL-900)

Business units are already building apps, flows, and reports in Power Platform. Without shared foundations and governance, that leads to unmanaged environments, unexpected licensing or storage costs, and data spread across tools IT never approved.

Why assign it: This beginner course gives IT Practitioners and business-side contributors a common baseline. It covers Power Automate, Power BI, Canvas Apps, Dataverse and connectors, including data sources such as Excel, SQL, Microsoft 365, and custom databases. Governance is built in: the administration module covers environment types (trial, sandbox, developer, production), data policies, role-based access, and billing notifications that warn you before spending passes budget.

Role fit: A strong fit for help desk staff, junior admins, analysts, and citizen developers. It is also a quick ramp for Team Leads who need to evaluate Power Platform requests. No coding background is required.

Time investment: About 6.5 hours across eight skills. That scope makes it practical to schedule around regular work in a one- to two-week enablement plan.

Change-management note: Pair this course with your internal environment and data policy standards. Learners can then build within guardrails instead of around them.

How CBT Nuggets supports the outcome: Each skill ends with a hands-on skill validation, such as building a Power BI dashboard or a Canvas App from a provided Excel dataset. Scenario-based reviews mirror the PL-900 question style and support certification readiness across your team.

IT teams complete this training to bring governed, low-code solutions into everyday operations instead of letting unmanaged apps and spreadsheets pile up. The course works through realistic scenarios. Learners build a canvas app from a weekly car part sales spreadsheet. They turn financial data into Power BI dashboards and use the model view to understand relationships. They build a desktop flow that opens and closes Excel, testing at each stage.

• Fewer repetitive manual tasks: Your team learns how triggers and actions work in Power Automate, including templates and the Record feature. They can automate scheduled, multi-region tasks with little to no code.
• Safer rollout through environments: IT Practitioners learn when to use trial, sandbox, developer, and production environments. This keeps critical business apps separate from experiments. They also learn to set data policies in the Power Platform admin center.
• Cost and access control: Team Leads learn to set billing notifications in the Microsoft 365 admin center before usage caps are exceeded. They also learn to restrict Dataverse data with role-based and table-level access. Data validation rules help reduce bad input and related vulnerabilities.
• Faster decisions and self-service support: Your team learns to model relationships across products, regions, and seasons in Power BI so stakeholders get visuals, not raw numbers. They also learn how Power Platform chatbots can answer customer FAQs around the clock, and how connectors support integration across Microsoft 365, SQL, and custom databases.

Skill validations at the end of each section mirror the scenario-based questions on the PL-900 exam.

Knowledge

• How Power Automate flows are structured around a trigger and one or more actions, and how templates and the desktop Record feature speed up low-code automation
• The purpose of Power Platform environment types (trial, sandbox, developer, production) and how they isolate work before it reaches production
• How the Microsoft 365 admin center and Power Apps admin center support security, billing notifications, and data policies for governance
• What Microsoft Dataverse provides: role-based and table-level access, data validation, business rules, relational storage, and connectors for integrating existing data
• The core Power BI Desktop views, including how the model view defines relationships across products, regions, and sales data
• How Power Platform tools map to business needs, including workflow approvals, internal team communication with canvas apps, and integrations with Microsoft 365, SQL, and custom database sources

Ability

• Build and test a desktop automation step by step, such as opening and closing Excel files on a schedule
• Import an Excel dataset into Power BI, transform it with Power Query, and build a basic dashboard with visuals
• Plan screens and layout, then create a canvas app from an existing table or imported spreadsheet data
• Configure environments and review data policies that govern which apps and connectors can be used
• Connect Power BI to SQL or other database sources, then model and visualize the data in reports and dashboards
• Answer scenario-based PL-900 questions by choosing the right Power Platform tool for each business requirement