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Where did my PowerPivot Excel 2010 tab go?
Posted by denglishbi on June 21, 2010
The other day I launched Excel 2010 to do a quick calculation and changed my mind. By changing my mind I didn’t mean that I didn’t want to perform the calculation anymore, just decided I didn’t want to wait for Excel 2010 to load. The reason that it takes a while now to load is the additional add-ins that I have installed which includes PowerPivot. As long as theses are activated they need to be loaded each time. Needless to say I am somewhat impatient and decided I would simply use another application to perform the calculation so I cancelled Excel during the load process.
It is an option, not sure if it is the right one that you want to pick, but needless to say this is what I went with and this caused some other message boxes to be displayed. And at this point I simply pick the option to close or cancel because once again I am a bit rather impatient sometimes.
So once that was done I open up my handy calculator and do the original calculation that I wanted. Later on I go ahead and open up Excel 2010 because I want to actually do some PowerPivot work. Well…where did my PowerPivot tab go?
What did I do? Oh no, I lost my PowerPivot. Did I corrupt it? Do I need to re-install the add-in for Excel? Help! I decided to do a quick Bing search on the issue and I come across a posting by the one and only Dave Wickert, PowerPivotGeek, PowerPivot for Excel add-in is not coming up in Excel. This tells me that maybe I need to activate the COM Add-in. Well the only thing it doesn’t tell me is where to do that…minor detail. First I need to find where the add-ins are even displayed.
- Click File—>Options and then select the Add-Ins page
- The in the Add-Ins page from the Manage drop down list select COM Add-ins and click the Go… button
3. Now check the box next to PowerPivot for Excel and click the OK button
Now the PowerPivot tab is back in the Excel 2010 Ribbon and you are back in business.
I still don’t like having to wait for the PowerPivot add-in to load each time because I am not actually using PowerPivot every single time when I open Excel and as I have stated, I can tend to be a tad on the impatient side sometimes. It would be nice to simply have a button that I could toggle to have this feature loaded on an as needed basis. Now I will tend to shy away from using Excel just because of the load time. I will look to leverage other applications like the calculator and the Internet more to handle the basic calculations that I used to use Excel 2007 for.
Here are a couple of additional resources for troubleshooting PowerPivot issues (in addition to the one I mentioned above):
Dan English's BI Blog 
giel said
Thank you very much for this help!
giel said
thx a lot for sharing this info!
Dmac said
When I follow the above steps, the tab for PP does not load, and in-fact when I go back to try again the aforementioned box is still “uncheck”. Does anyone know of this or have an idea on it? Thanks in advance.
denglishbi said
Did the add-in ever display for you? Have you tried to simply uninstall the add-in and reinstall it making sure you install the correct 32 or 64 bit version? I would also make sure you have installed all of the required components as well – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210640.aspx#workstation (particularly the Office Shared Features when you installed Excel 2010). I would probably try reinstalling the software to see if that resolves your issue.
Jindrich Seda said
Same here. I check it, press OK, but the PowerPivot tab does not appear. When I go back, it is still unchecked. I tried reinstalling the PowerPivot, but it is still the same. Before this crash (it went exactly as in the post above) it worked fine.
Jindrich Seda said
Ha, stupido. It was in “not allowed” addons. I guess it was added after the crash. Removing it and then enabling the checkbox did the trick.
Ajay said
Hi Jindrich,
Yes, After 2 days of my struggle of unable to see powerpivot tab in excel. I was able to see when I delete and add again in the excel. Thanks for the post
Tavis Lovell | Where did my PowerPivot tab go? said
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Nashat said
Thanks!!!
Barry said
of course you could just enable the Developer tab on the ribbon by modifying ribbon and the com add in button would appear on the toolbar and would be there always
Mariano said
Hi I have accidentally removed the power pivot add-in, now when i install power pivot it still does not appear. How do I bring it back?
denglishbi said
I would make sure that it is available in your COM add-ins and that it is enabled. Plus make sure you install the right version, but I believe you would get an error message if it was the wrong version and you tried to install it.