Did you notice the update to Power Pivot in Excel 2013? Did you know that one was available? Neither did I until I heard about it 2 weeks ago. It certainly came without fanfare, and I’ve only finally gotten around to getting it on my system recently (more on that later). The only visible change that I can see is the support for synonyms. You have always been able to rename columns in Power Pivot, but now you can specify alternate names, or synonyms. This is to better support the upcoming natural language query feature called Power Q&A.
You’ll know if you have this update by clicking on the Power Pivot tab, clicking the manage button, and finally selecting the Advanced tab from the Power Pivot window. If you see the synonyms button in the ribbon, then you have the update.
Working with synonyms is pretty straightforward. I have a table of airline codes loaded, and the table has a “comments” column. I may want to refer to that column as “notes”, or “other information”. To do so,I click the synonyms button in the ribbon. Power Pivot flips to diagram view, and opens up the synonyms editor on the right side of the window. For the “Comments” field, I simply enter my alternate terms separated by commas. And that’s about it.
Once it is available, Power Q&A will make use of these synonyms when performing natural language queries, but for now, they’re not really used for anything. What I find interesting here though is the way that this update has been delivered.
As I mentioned above, I was unaware of this update until I heard about it through word of mouth. It was not added through Windows update of WSUS, but it was streamed out to users that are using subscription based Office installs from Office 365. In particular, it was sent to users that installed Office using the new Click-To-Run delivery method. I was using an MSI based Office installation, so I never saw it. In order to get this update, I literally had to uninstall Office, then reinstall it using Click-To-Run. As far as I am aware, this is the only way to receive this update.
I also find it odd that while client side changes to Lync were called out in the “What’s New: November 2013” article on the Office 365 Technology blog, no mention whatsoever was made of this change. It’s almost as though this delivery system is being tested with a low impact feature first. I also find it interesting in that the new “cloud first” deployment approach applies not only to the services themselves, as you might expect, but to the clients that use those services. It makes sense, but may take some getting used to.
I’ve been one of those MSI holdouts. I’m an old dog, and Click-To-Run is a new trick, but I’ll be using it moving forward. There’s really no reason not to.