PowerView Feature Comparisons

PowerView experience will be delivered across several Microsoft products:

1. Excel (fat client)
2. Excel Services (SharePoint)
3. SharePoint – SQL Edition
4. Office 365
5. PowerPoint

I get a lot of questions as to what features are supported across all these deployment scenarios. Luckily Microsoft shared a slide that I will attempt to reproduce here that explains what features work where and how.

There are several interesting points to make here.

1. Microsoft thinks of “Export to PowerPoint” as a feature as opposed to thinking of PowerPoint as another environment for Power View like Excel even though the PowerPoint does support the authoring capability as it is outlined here
2. There seems to be some fragmentation in several important features such as ability to support multidimensional models and multiple external models
3. No Windows RT support is very annoying (given the fact that RT is happily supporting Flash but not Microsoft own Silverlight). I understand (although do not agree with) that Microsoft had to scale down the RT functionality in order to please its hardware partners; however, I do not understand why I do not even have an option to BUY the missing functionality such as Silverlight, Outlook, etc. (or rather the entire Office Professional) for Windows RT. As I mentioned before, I love the Surface from the hardware perspective, however, I believe that I should be able to have an option to upgrade my user experience to the full featured product for additional $$$ if I have to