Run your first scan

Power BI Desktop. This walkthrough is the local desktop flow against a Power BI file on disk (.pbix, .pbip, or any other Power BI Desktop format) — available in every edition, free for personal and commercial use. With a licence key (paid Enterprise or an active free trial), Measure Killer unlocks upgraded features in this same flow — see What changes with a licence below. To scan models hosted in the Power BI Service instead, see Run your first online scan.

Open the file in Power BI Desktop

Measure Killer attaches to a running Power BI Desktop instance — it doesn’t read Power BI files on its own. Open the file you want to analyze in Power BI Desktop (.pbix, .pbip, or any other supported format), then launch Measure Killer (from the Start menu, or from the External Tools ribbon if you ran the admin installer).

Pick the mode

On the Measure Killer welcome screen, click Single model and report (under the Developers group) — this is the local desktop scan mode for a single model open in Power BI Desktop.

Select your open file

Measure Killer detects every Power BI Desktop instance it can see and lists them in the Dataset selection dialog. Pick the file you have open from the dropdown and click Next.

Run the scan

Double-check the selected file shown in the toolbar, then click Analyze. The scan parses the model, walks every visual on every page, and indexes references between them.

Read the results

When the scan finishes, the main pane shows the Where-used view: every column, measure, table and relationship in the model, with the table it belongs to, the source field, data type, size, and a count of how many visuals, filters, measures or other objects reference it. Rows highlighted in red are flagged as unused — nothing in the report consumes them, so they’re safe to remove.

Click to zoom.

Re-scan after every change

After making changes in Power BI Desktop, click Analyze in Measure Killer again to refresh the view. Whether you also need to save the file first depends on what you changed:

• Semantic-model changes — adding or removing a measure, editing a DAX expression, changing a column type or a relationship — are picked up live from the running Power BI Desktop instance. No save needed; just click Analyze again.
• Report-layer changes — adding or removing a visual, tweaking a visual-level filter, editing a page — only reach Measure Killer once they’re written to disk. Save the file in Power BI Desktop first, then click Analyze again.

Until you re-analyze, the Measure Killer view still reflects the previous scan and any cleanup decisions will be based on stale data.

What changes with a licence

The desktop flow is the same in every edition, but Measure Killer enables upgraded features as soon as it sees a licence key — a paid Enterprise key and an active free trial key both unlock the same experience. The most visible difference is the Clean your model tab, which turns “I scanned my model” into “I have a prioritised cleanup plan”. It lists step-by-step optimization suggestions — remove unused artifacts, disable auto-datetime, prune unused field-parameter tables, drop hidden visuals in bookmarks, and so on — with an estimated reduction in model size for each one, ordered so the biggest wins are at the top. The Clean your model tab isn’t available on the free edition.

Click to zoom.

Don’t have a key yet? Request a free trial — the trial unlocks every paid feature against your own Power BI file.

Next steps

• Run your first online scan — same idea, but against shared semantic models in the Power BI Service (paid).
• Find unused measures
• Best-practice analysis