Powerpivot has now become a native part of Excel 2013, which was available as a separate add-in in prior version. This very of powerpviot comes with few new inevitable enhancements like ability to edit tabular models. This is a very welcome news. But the news that I am not happy with is, there is also an add-in available for PowerView with Excel 2013.

After reading some of you might wonder why am I not happy with this news as this makes Excel a very powerful client tool as the reporting capabilities would get a silverlight based animatory touch. The reason is that as of this draft and to the best of my knowledge, PowerView is not available with SSRS 2012 native mode. It's a Sharepoint only available feature. In my opinion, it should be made available in BIDS as well as SSRS native mode too, in the form of an external add-in and rendering extension respectively.

Another thing that seems strange to me is why is PowerView add-in available as a COM add-in. I am not that deeply aware of office add-ins, but from a general development standpoint, from the name I understand that its a COM component. In .NET terms it's unmanaged code / component, instead of a .NET Framework based managed code. If that's the case, my curiosity asks why COM ?

An interesting outcome of this can be that Powerpivot in Excel 2013 would become the new BIDS as well as reports manager for PowerView based reports, instead of buying entire enterprise class license for better compressed reports, data alerts and powerview which are the major enhancements available in SSRS 2012 Sharepoint integrated mode.

One another such very interesting capability is provided by PivotViewer Extension for Reporting Services, but its in CTP2. But even this application is available with Sharepoint only.