Where the **** did my Power View go?

Recently I was presenting a session on Microsoft’s Power View in what I had intended to be my final time presenting the session before retiring it to the archives.  Unfortunately the presentation didn’t go as planned.  For the life of me, I couldn’t find my Power View icon in the MS Excel ribbon, and began to go out of my mind!  Note, I’ve discussed this topic at various SQL Saturdays and User Groups for the past couple of years, and it started to become somewhat of a second nature for me doing demo after demo of the various components and moving on to the next.  So, it’s only natural that phrases like “it was just here” and “what did Microsoft do this time!!” came out of my mouth in front of the group, and I rapidly changed my focus and did what components of the demo I could show in PowerBI as an alternative.  Later find out that, in fact, Microsoft did do something.  With an assumed effort to get people to use PowerBI and move away from Silverlight, Microsoft made the decision to remove the button from Excel in both Excel 2013 and Excel 2016 as described in the following article by John P White:

https://www.itunity.com/article/rethinking-business-intelligence-sharepoint-sql-server-2016-2936

He also included a nice “How To” to get it back into Excel if that’s how you want to use it here:

http://whitepages.unlimitedviz.com/2015/07/power-view-excel-2016/

A couple of lessons learned from this and, in a sense, re-learned: 1) every time you think you know what Microsoft is doing, you don’t. 2) do at least one quick dry run of your presentation immediately before the presentation, or as close to it as possible 3) Power View appears to be transitioning to a “legacy” product… I guess it was a good time to retire the session