Important This feature isn’t available in Office on a Windows RT PC. Power View and PowerPivot are only available in the Office Professional Plus and Office 365 Professional Plus editions. Read Excel 2010 workbooks with PowerPivot don't work in some versions of Excel 2013. Want to see what version of Office you’re using?
Power View is an interactive data exploration, visualization, and presentation experience that encourages intuitive ad-hoc reporting. Power View is now available in Microsoft Excel 2013. It is also a feature of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and 2013 as part of the SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Server Enterprise Edition.
See What’s new in Power View in Excel 2013 and in SharePoint Server.
Watch Power View and PowerPivot How-to videos
With Power View you can interact with data:
- In the same Excel workbook as the Power View sheet.
- In data models in Excel workbooks published in a PowerPivot Gallery.
- In tabular models deployed to SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services (SSAS) instances.
In this article
Two versions of Power View
Power View reports in SharePoint are RDLX files. In Excel, Power View sheets are part of an Excel XLSX workbook. You can’t open a Power View RDLX file in Excel, or open an Excel XLSX file with Power View sheets in Power View in SharePoint. You also can’t copy charts or other visualizations from the RDLX file into the Excel workbook.
However, you can save Excel XLSX files with Power View sheets to SharePoint, either on premises on in Office 365, and open those files in SharePoint. Read more about Power View in Excel in SharePoint Server 2013 or in SharePoint Online in Office 365.
Both versions of Power View need Silverlight installed on the machine.
Get started with either version
Presentation-ready
A Power View report is always presentable – you can browse your data and present it at any time, because you’re working with real data. You don’t need to preview your report to see how it looks.
Power View in SharePoint has reading and full-screen presentation modes, in which the ribbon and other design tools are hidden to provide more room for the visualizations. The report is still fully interactive, with filtering and highlighting capability.
Data sources for Power View
In Excel 2013, you can use data right in Excel as the basis for Power View in Excel and SharePoint. When you add tables and create relationships between them, Excel is creating a Data Model behind the scenes. A data model is a collection of tables and their relationships reflecting the real-world relationships between business functions and processes—for example, how Products relates to Inventory and Sales. You can continue modifying and enhancing that same data model in PowerPivot in Excel, to make a more sophisticated data model for Power View reports.
You can also create Power View reports based on a tabular model running on a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services (SSAS) server.
Tabular and data models act as a bridge between the complexities of back-end data sources and your perspective of the data. The semantic layer of the model means that everything in Power View just works together.
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Creating charts and other visualizations
In Power View, you can quickly create a variety of visualizations, from tables and matrices to pie, bar, and bubble charts and sets of multiple charts. For every visualization you want to create, start with a table, which you then convert easily to other visualizations to find one best illustrates your data. To create a table, click a table or field in the field list, or drag a field from the field list to the view. Power View draws the table in the view, displaying your actual data and automatically adding column headings.
To convert a table to other visualizations, click a visualization type on the Design tab. Power View only enables the charts and other visualizations that work best for that data in that table. For example, if Power View doesn’t detect any aggregated numeric values, then no charts are enabled.
Read more in charts and other data visualizations in Power View
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Filtering and highlighting data
Power View provides several ways to filter data. Power View uses the metadata in the underlying data model to understand the relationships between the different tables and fields in a workbook or report. Because of these relationships, you can use one visualization to filter and highlight all the visualizations in a sheet or view. Or you can display the filters area and define filters that apply to an individual visualization or to all the visualizations in a sheet or view. In Power View in SharePoint, you can leave the filter pane visible or hide it before switching to reading or full-screen mode.
Read more in Filtering and highlighting in Power View.
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Slicers
Slicers in Excel enable you to compare and evaluate your data from different perspectives. Slicers in Power View are similar. When you have multiple slicers on a view and you select an entry in one slicer, that selection filters the other slicers in the view.
Read more about Slicers in Power View.
Sorting
You can sort tables, matrices, bar and column charts, and sets of small multiples in Power View. You sort the columns in tables and matrices, the categories or numeric values in charts, and the multiple field or the numeric values in a set of multiples. In each case, you can sort ascending or descending either on attributes such as Product Name, or on numeric values such as Total Sales.
Read more in Sorting in Power View.
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Reports with multiple views in Power View in SharePoint
A single Power View in SharePoint report can contain multiple views. All views in a Power View report in SharePoint are based on the same tabular model. Each view has its own visualizations, and filters on each view are for that view only.
Read more in Reports with multiple views in Power View in SharePoint.
Note In Excel, each Power View sheet is a separate worksheet. A single Excel workbook can contain any number of Power View sheets, and each Power View sheet can be based on a different model. Read more about Power View sheets connecting to different data models in What’s new in Power View in Excel 2013 and in SharePoint Server.
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Performance
To enhance performance, Power View only retrieves the data it needs at any given time for a data visualization. Thus, even if a table in the sheet or view is based on an underlying data model that contains millions of rows, Power View only fetches data for the rows that are visible in the table at any one time. If you drag the scroll bar to the bottom of the table, you notice it pops back up so you can scroll down farther as Power View retrieves more rows.
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Share your Power View reports
Share Power View in Excel
You can save your Excel workbooks to a SharePoint 2013 site with Excel Services in SharePoint, or Excel Web Apps, either on-premises or in the cloud. Others can view and interact with the Power View sheets in the workbooks you have saved there.
You can hide individual sheets in an Excel workbook, so you could hide all the other sheets in a workbook and leave only the Power View sheets visible.
Read more about Power View in Excel in SharePoint Server 2013 or in SharePoint Online in Office 365.
Share Power View in SharePoint reports
When you create Power View reports in SharePoint, you save them to SharePoint Server 2010 or 2013, where others can view and interact with them. Others can also edit them, and depending on their permissions on the server, they can save their changes. Read more about creating, saving, and printing Power View reports.
You can also export an interactive version of your Power View in SharePoint report to PowerPoint. Each view in Power View becomes a separate PowerPoint slide. Interacting with Power View reports exported to PowerPoint is similar to interacting with views in Power View reading and full-screen modes: You can interact with the visualizations and filters that the report creator has added to each view, but you can’t create visualizations or filters.
Read more in Export a report from Power View in SharePoint to PowerPoint.
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Comparing Power View, Report Builder, and Report Designer
Power View doesn’t replace the existing Reporting Services reporting products.
Report Designer is a sophisticated design environment that developers and IT pros use for embedded reporting in their applications. In Report Designer they can create operational reports, shared data sources, and shared datasets, and author report viewer controls.
In Report Builder, IT pros and power users can create powerful operational reports and reusable report parts and shared datasets.
Report Builder and Report Designer create RDL reports; Power View creates RDLX reports. Power View cannot open RDL reports, and vice versa.
Note RDL reports can run on report servers in Reporting Services native mode or in SharePoint mode. Power View RDLX reports can run only on report servers in SharePoint mode.
Both Report Designer and Report Builder ship in SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 Reporting Services, along with Power View. Read more about SQL Server Reporting Services tools.
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Using PowerPivot to set Power View Reporting Properties
There are a number of properties you can set in PowerPivot that will improve the Power View reporting experience.
- Select default aggregations
- Set the default title, image, and identifier for each table in your model
- Determine how duplicate values are handled in Power View reports
- Hide tables, fields, and measures from the Power View user
- Set the default fields for a table so that when you click on a table in Power View, all of the default fields will be simultaneously added to the report
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More about Power View
Power View in Excel and in SharePoint
What’s new in Power View in Excel 2013 and in SharePoint Server
Power View basic design tasks
Charts and other visualizations in Power View
Filtering and highlighting in Power View
Hierarchies in Power View
Sorting in Power View
Change a sum to an average or other aggregate in Power View
Format Power View reports
Power View in Excel
Start Power View in Excel 2013
Relationships in Power View
Refresh the data or data model for a Power View sheet
Power View in Excel in SharePoint Server or SharePoint Online in Office 365
Tutorial: Optimize your Data Model for Power View reporting
Tutorial: Create a Power View report with Windows Azure Marketplace data
Visualizing the Summer Olympic Games with Power View in Excel 2013
Power View in SharePoint
System requirements for Power View in SharePoint
Create, save, and print Power View in SharePoint reports
Keyboard shortcuts and accessibility in Power View in SharePoint
Reports with multiple views in Power View in SharePoint
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