One of the many exciting features of Office 2013 is that PowerPivot now comes as a part of the installation & Power View is now available in the client for Excel 2013 , rather than being an post installation add-in for PowerPivot and web resident only for PowerView.  PowerPivot is still a COM add-in, but is not more tightly integrated with the product & Power View is now a COM Add-in.

I upgraded to Office 2013, removing the 2010 version, on Monday night and immediately I was faced with a problem.  PowerPivot showed in the ribbon, but was not clickable! After attempting to click in the greyed out bar for about 5 minutes I started digging in.  I found that PowerPivot was active in the Add-ins section, but something didn’t seem quite right:

This Add-in was the SQL 2012 version.  Once I unchecked this and went back to the Add-ins section I found the newer version of PowerPivot was now available.  There was a conflict with the older version blocking the newer version from being able to be activated.

Once I checked “Microsoft Office PowerPivot for Excel 2013” (and Power View since I was already here and excited to check it out) the Manage option in the ribbon lit up and I was off to the races.

Since I still need to do work with PowerPivot v2 models and am not willing to upgrade everything to the beta version yet, I did re-install Office 2010 and now have the fun experience of two PowerPivot tabs in my ribbon in Excel 2013 (doesn’t happen in Excel 2010), but if I disable the older version of PowerPivot in 2013, it disables it in 2010 as well. 

I have yet to have an issue with having both add-ins active at once since reactivating the older version, as the active add-in is the only one that lights up.

More to come on the great new features of PowerPivot, Power View and Inquire, but for now its time to get back to my vacation