Power BI for Data Exploration

When people talk about Power BI, they often focus on building polished reports and dashboards meant for a wide audience. But for me, Power BI is just as valuable as a personal data‑exploration tool. Many of the reports I create are never published, and that’s perfectly fine. Power BI is not only great for producing beautiful visuals; it’s also incredibly powerful for digging into data and answering questions quickly.

Recently, while preparing for a pilot project involving a new application in Archibus, I wanted to identify which users submitted the highest number of maintenance requests, specifically, users outside Facilities Management. I could have sifted through the data directly in Archibus, but exporting the request data into Power BI gave me far more flexibility.

Using Power BI’s Top N filter, I quickly surfaced the most frequent requestors. From there, it was easy to deselect internal Facilities Management employees, leaving me with a clean list of external requestors sorted by volume. This approach was fast, clear, and required no complicated calculations — just visual filtering and exploration.

Power BI may be known for dashboards, but it’s also a fantastic tool for analyzing data on your own and discovering insights you might otherwise miss.