During my final session of SharePoint Fest Chicago on Wednesday I was doing a demo of Power View using my Office 365 E3 tenant & came across something new, that I had only previously seen in Power BI. The new feature in question is the Power View using HTML5.

Here is what we saw:

Naturally this caused some immediate excitement, referred to by one in attendance as a nerdgasm, as this feature had been promised to us since PASS last year. Here is what we found as we walked through the preview…

First, I hovered over the icon the following tool tip showed up:

Once clicked, we flipped over to the new HTML5 preview and the following announcement showed up in the lower left hand corner of the screen:

The “More Info” link here takes you over to a support article on the Microsoft site that contains a list of what is and is not supported under the preview as well as some great FAQs, the highlights I will list at the close of this article.

The first thing that happened when I clicked into the new HTML5 preview was that I got a failure message. Currently the preview does not support hierarchies or drilldown, both of which were present in the Power View that I was attempting to demo.

I switched to a different Power View to demo that was simply a line graph with some slicers and this is what I got:

It looked pretty great to me at first, until I stopped and looked at the slicers. I flipped out of the HTML5 preview to validate that my Power View was built correctly and it was.

The fields that were represented incorrectly in the slicers were text fields, not numeric fields. Specifically what is supposed to show here is the text of month & day of the week names. Intestingly, the “Quarter” field is a concatenated field using the DAX equation of =Concatenate(“Q”,[QuarterofYear]). Not yet sure why this is happening, but as we are dealing with a preview here there is an expectation of bugs.

Here are a couple of important things from the Microsoft Support FAQ regarding the Power View for HTML5 Preview:

1.) Currently only IE 10 & higher are supported. Other browsers may work, but are not supported at this time.
2.) The preview is only available in English today.
3.) The only way to make the HTML5 Preview the default view for Power View is to uninstall Silverlight
4.) There is still not support for embedding a Power View into an app or page, though they state they know this is a big one and are considering it for a future release.

The bottom line here is that this is a preview, not the final product. Regardless, I am über excited that it is finally here.