Power View (SSRS)
Important
Please visit the most up-to-date Power View documentation on office.microsoft.com. Power View is now a feature of Microsoft Excel 2013, and is part of the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and 2013 Enterprise Editions.
Power View, a feature of SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition, is an interactive data exploration, visualization, and presentation experience. It provides intuitive ad-hoc reporting for business users such as data analysts, business decision makers, and information workers. They can easily create and interact with views of data from data models based on PowerPivot workbooks published in a PowerPivot Gallery, or tabular models deployed to SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services (SSAS) instances. Power View is a browser-based Silverlight application launched from SharePoint Server 2010 that enables users to present and share insights with others in their organization through interactive presentations.
Power View report with multiple views featuring tiles, slicers, a chart filter, and a number of visualizations, including cards, small multiples, and a bubble chart.
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For more Power View resources, see the Power View Overview page on the Microsoft TechNet wiki.
In this article
Presentation-ready
Based on data models
Visual design experience
Creating data visualizations
Filtering and highlighting data
Sorting
Reports with multiple views
Performance
Comparing Power View, Report Builder, and Report Designer
In this section
Presentation-ready
A Power View report is always presentable – you can browse your data and present it at any time, because you’re working with real data. You don’t need to preview your report to see how it looks.
Power View does have reading and full-screen presentation modes, in which the ribbon and other design tools are hidden to provide more room for the visualizations. The report is still fully interactive, with filtering and highlighting capability.
You can export an interactive version of your Power View report to PowerPoint. Each view in Power View becomes a separate PowerPoint slide. Interacting with Power View reports exported to PowerPoint is similar to interacting with Power View views in Power View reading and full-screen modes: You can interact with the visualizations and filters that the report creator has added to each view, but you cannot create visualizations or filters. For more information, see the Export to PowerPoint section of Creating, Saving, Exporting, and Printing Power View Reports.
You can also publish your reports to SharePoint Server 2010 so others can view and interact with them there.
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Based on data models
Power View is a thin web client that launches right in the browser from a data model in SharePoint Server 2010. The model can be a PowerPivot model workbook or a tabular model running on a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services (SSAS) server. When you’re working in Power View, you don’t need to know the names of servers, or know about security or permissions. You don’t download anything to your machine. It’s automatically connected to the data model from which you launched Power View.
The data model acts as a bridge between the complexities of back-end data sources and your perspective of the data. The rich semantic layer of the data model means that everything in the report just works together.
For more information about connection files, see Create a Shared Data Source for a Data Model (SSRS).
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Visual design experience
Power View features views in which you can play with your data in an environment similar to Microsoft Office with the familiar ribbon. You can switch your data easily between different visualizations, from a table to a bar chart to a bubble chart, for example, to find the one that best illustrates your point. You see actual data at all times. There’s no distinction between ‘design time’ and ‘run time.’
For more information, see Power View Design Experience.
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Creating data visualizations
In Power View, you can quickly create a variety of visualizations, from tables and matrices to bubble charts and sets of small multiple charts. For every visualization you want to create, you start with a table, which you can then easily convert to other visualizations, to determine which one best illustrates your data. To create a table, you click a table or field in the field list, or you drag a field from the field list to the view. Power View draws the table in the view, displaying your actual data and automatically adding column headings.
To convert a table to other visualizations, you click a visualization type in the Visualizations gallery on the Table Tools Design tab. Depending on the data in your table, Power View enables and disables different visualization types to give you the best visualization for that data.
For more information, see Data Visualizations in Power View.
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Filtering and highlighting data
Power View provides several ways to filter data. Because of the metadata in the underlying data model, Power View knows the relationships between the different tables and fields in a report. Because of these relationships, you can use one visualization to filter and highlight all the visualizations in your report. Or you can display the filters area and define filters that will apply to an individual visualization or to all the visualizations on a view. You can leave the filter pane visible or hide it before switching to reading or full-screen mode.
For more information, see Filtering, Highlighting, and Slicers in Power View.
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Sorting
You can sort tables, matrices, bar and column charts, and sets of small multiples in Power View. You sort the columns in tables and matrices, the categories or measures in charts, and the multiple field or the measures in small multiples. In each case, you can sort ascending or descending either on attributes, such as Product Name, or measures, such as Total Sales.
For more information, see Sorting in Power View and Measure and Non-Measure Fields in Power View.
Reports with multiple views
A single report can contain multiple views. All the views are based on the same data model. Each view has its own visualizations, and filters on each view are for that view only.
For more information, see Reports with Multiple Views in Power View.
Performance
To enhance performance, Power View only retrieves the data it needs at any given time for a data visualization. Thus, even if a table in the view is based on an underlying table that contains millions of rows, Power View only fetches data for the rows that are visible in the view at any one time.
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Comparing Power View, Report Builder, and Report Designer
Power View won’t replace the existing Reporting Services reporting products.
Report Designer is a sophisticated design environment that developers and IT pros can use for embedded reporting in their applications. In Report Designer they can create operational reports, shared data sources, and shared datasets, and author report viewer controls.
In Report Builder, IT pros and power users can create powerful operational reports, and reusable report parts and shared datasets.
Report Builder and Report Designer create RDL reports; Power View creates RDLX reports. Power View cannot open RDL reports, and vice versa.
Both Report Designer and Report Builder are shipping in SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services, along with Power View. For more information, see Tools (SSRS).
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In this section
System requirements for Power View
Create a Reporting Services Report Using PowerPivot Data
Creating, Saving, Exporting, and Printing Power View Reports
Data Visualizations in Power View
Reports with Multiple Views in Power View
Filtering, Highlighting, and Slicers in Power View
Measure and Non-Measure Fields in Power View
Keyboard Shortcuts and Accessibility in Power View
Tutorial: Create a Sample Report in Power View
Tutorial: Optimize a Sample PowerPivot Model for Power View Reports
See Also
Concepts
Tabular Modeling (SSAS Tabular)