Office 2013, Office 365 Editions and BI Features by Chris Webb.
From the post:
By now you’re probably aware that Office 2013 is in the process of being officially released, and that Office 365 is a very hot topic. You’ve probably also read lots of blog posts by me and other writers talking about the cool new BI functionality in Office 2013 and Office 365. But which editions of Office 2013 and Office 365 include the BI functionality, and how does Office 365 match up to plain old non-subscription Office 2013 for BI? It’s surprisingly hard to find out the answers…
For regular, non-subscription, Office 2013 on the desktop you need Office Professional Plus to use the PowerPivot addin or to use Power View in Excel. However there’s an important distinction to make: the xVelocity engine is now natively integrated into Excel 2013, and this functionality is called the Excel Data Model and is available in all desktop editions of Excel. You only need the PowerPivot addin, and therefore Professional Plus, if you want to use the PowerPivot Window to modify and extend your model (for example by adding calculated columns or KPIs). So even if you’re not using Professional Plus you can still do some quite impressive BI stuff with PivotTables etc. On the server, the only edition of Sharepoint 2013 that has any BI functionality is Enterprise Edition; there’s no BI functionality in Foundation or Standard Editions.
No matter what OS you are running, you are likely to be using some version of MS Office and if you are reading this blog, probably for BI purposes.
Chris does a great job at pointing to resources and generating resources to guide you through the feature/license thicket that surrounds MS Office in its various incarnations.
Complex licensing/feature matrices contribute to the size of department budgets that create such complexity. They don’t contribute to the bottom line at Microsoft. There is a deep and profound difference.