I have inherited a quite large model from a colleague and it contains a large number of tables and I am not sure exactly which are being used and which are unused and can therefore be deleted. What is the easiest way to identify unused tables, that means that are not used in other tables (merge etc) or related to by a measure/column etc. in a report? I tried Power BI Helper that allows me to extract all M queries so I can manually search through and look for references to tables, but I wonder if there is a better way.
I previously used Power BI Documenter from https://www.datavizioner.com/ to do this very easily. It has now moved from an open beta type of distribution to a free trial/purchase-to-use model. I would recommend giving the free trial a shot.
If you do that and it works for you (or not), please post back and let us all know.
Another recommendation here would be to go through the model and clean it up. I actually do this myself quite a bit when I find a model that is hard to understand and hasn’t been developed with any best practices.
If you can run through this course here, everything is explained in detail.
I’m confident that if you apply all of these ideas and techniques into your model then it won’t be a complicated as you think.
