Refining a model after report production

After I have completed a model and finalised my report development I want to be able to hop back in to the query editor and refine it, removing any unused columns from each table in the model. However, I cannot find a way of seeing which columns are redundant and unused - is this something that is possible?

I am hoping I am missing something simple as this would be a really powerful thing to be able to utilise

Dave

Hi Dave, I currently don’t think this is a feature, but is an interesting concept. If I just say from my experience it’s actually a difficult one to program I think because it does come done to the developers perceived usage of the report going forward.

For example you may have either dimensions used as filters or numeric columns used in measures that are currently not being utilized in any way, BUT may do in the future so it becomes quite subjective and comes back to the developer and how they may want the model and report to be used in the future.

I think that it’s good practice to HIDE filters and number columns that aren’t being used in the table area and then assess as you go whether there would ultimately be any required for that column going forward. If not then delete it in the query editor.

Sam

Thanks for the reply Sam,

What I was hoping for was to able to get to the end of my development phase and then have a simple way of seeing which columns are used across my report in any measures or filters. In the same way you can click on a visualisation and it displays which columns and measures are used within it but now at whole of report level.

This would then give us a quick and simple way of seeing whether we are left with redundant columns that can be removed without any worry of impacting on the report

Dave

Yes, agree this would be a great feature. I have a feeling someone has likely voted for this at the Power BI site.

I did a quick look

No replay yet from MS

Unfortunately, No Dave you are not!..

You need to look into other 3 rd party options.

Like

or

Dax Visual Studio from SQL guys…Matt Allingtons post is best i have found

Good Luck and Cheers

Thanks Garry

The Power BI Helper tool (although in its infancy) is great start to this and will most certainly help.

Hopefully this kind of thing will eventually be built directly into Power BI at some point in the future

Dave

Yes, I think its very useful and so to Dax Studio.

If you read Reza’s Blog … you will note the new tree explorer feature which is handy for documentation around measures and calculated columns which i use in my project documentation for the client together with the other features.