SharePoint 2013 On Premise: “conflict” between Excel Services, PowerView and Office Web Apps

In a typical SharePoint 2013 Business Intelligence farm, we install Excel Services, SQL Server 2012 SP1, Reporting Services, Analysis services and so on…Therefore Excel documents (with the Powerpivot and Powerview stuff) are  managed and rendered by Excel Services.Great.

Then we install Office Web Apps in a WAC server and we associate the SharePoint farm and the WAC server by typing New-SPWopiBinding –ServerName <yourServerName> –AllowHttp  (or AllowHttps in production).

Then our Office documents (word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote) can be rendered and edited  in pure html/javascript.

The problem is that if you want to make use of the new Self Service BI features like PowerView in Excel Workbooks, you get stuck because the rendering is now managed by Office Web Apps; the rendering of PowerView worksheets is supposed to be managed by Excel Service.

 

For instance this is what you will get if you try to display a PowerView worksheet :

Solution 1

A first brutal solution is to remove the link between the SharePoint farm and the WAC server by typing (in Powershell) Remove-SPWOPIBinding –All:$true  but then you loose the whole WAC stuff.

Solution 2

A better solution is to remove only the Excel Web Access functionality

Remove-SPWOPIBinding –Application Excel

Solution 3

Another solution is to move to SharePoint Online, where you Office web apps can render the PowerView worksheets (very funny ?). Actually it is not funny at all, because if you workbook contains some PowerView stuff, you won’t be able to edit it, even if you the document is rendered by Office Web Access…To complicate the matter a little bit more, in O365 you will still get the Edit workbook menu (even if you have some powerview stuff) :

But when you edit, you will get this dialog/warning :

You will be prompted to provide a name for the copy

…and in the new editable version, all PowerView worksheets will be removed. So yes, it is a workaround.And it looks like we don’t have this feature on Premise…(in the RTM version).

Solution 4

That’s it ? no, there is another alternative which is to move your workbook (with the associated BI semantic Data Model provided by PowerPivot) to a PowerPivot gallery and from there you create you PowerView Report (this was already possible in SharePoint 2010 Enterprise); don’t expect the PowerView worksheets to show up, you have to create a new separate PowerView report (rdlx)

 

Now, if you publish an Excel workbook with a PowerView worksheet to the PowerPivot gallery, you will get this (error) in the carousel (and theater views) :

But if you switch to the normal (all Documents views), you will be able to visualize your PowerView sheets like in a normal document library.

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