Some Thoughts on Power View in Office 2013 Preview Install Sequence

I’ve successfully installed Office 2013 Preview on a Virtual Machine, which is running Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Server. And I have to say – I LOVE it, and I LOVE having PowerView embedded in Excel. I wasn’t sure if it was really there, so I downloaded it and tried it out for myself. And there it is! I’ve been producing Power View reports this morning, saved to SkyDrive, and all within Excel. You’ve no idea how happy that makes me!

Given my happiness at finally seeing PowerView in Excel, I had to nitpick.  However, I did have two thoughts about the install sequence:

There seems to be no ‘dependency checker’ prior to the installation sequence.

.NET Framework Dependency

Power View (and many other things as well!) needs the Microsoft .NET framework, version 3.5 as a minimum. You can install Office 2013 without the .NET Framework version 3.5, but you will soon get the following error message:

Silverlight Dependency

Power View in Office 2013 does still need Silverlight, but this isn’t included as part of the Installation Sequence. Perhaps this should be included as part of a ‘dependency checker’, like the .NET framework?

If you don’t install Silverlight, you will get a message in the ‘Information Bar’.

I will submit the feedback more officially via Connect, when I can see where to do it 🙂 and will post the links here.

I hope that helps!
Jen