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Power View report migration from SharePoint 2010 to 2013

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With the latest changes to the Microsoft Power BI and ability to create Power View reports within an Excel file (starting from Excel 2013) perhaps there will be no big need to migrate old stand alone Power View reports which were based on Power Pivot data models created in Excel 2010. You can just recreate you Power View analytics in Excel 2013 and off you go: users can see and interact with new reports either using desktop or Office 365 versions of Excel; and not to worry about SharePoint deployment platform.

However, if you really want to bring your old Power View reports from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013, it is still possible. During the time working on this task and I couldn't find any automotive tools that would enable me to migrate both the Power Pivot model file along with its related Power View report; so all the techniques described in this post are pure file upgrading and manipulation (so if you find some tools for this I would really appreciate).

Basically, in the old SharePoint 2010 and Excel 2010 world you could create a Power View report with two artifacts: (1) Power Pivot data model in Excel 2010 file and (2) Power View report which is based on that model.

First thing I did was upgrading the Power Pivot data model from Excel 2010 to Excel 2013 by just opening my old data model file in Excel 2013 and consented to upgrade the data model (here is the official information for this: Upgrade Power Pivot Data Models to Excel 2013). It took less then a minute to do the upgrade in my case, it make take longer depending on a size of your model. And then I deployed this upgraded Power Pivot data model file to the SharePoint 2013.

I could have done the same thing with the Power View .rdlx file by just copying it to the new SharePoint location; however the report still was connected to the old Power Pivot model file; and this needed to be fixed.

1) I've changed the file extension of my Power View .rdlx report to .zip and opened it as an archive file:







2) Then I went to the [Reports] folder where my PowerView report definition resided in the [report.rdl] file:







3) And then I just edited the data source connecting string and directed it to the upgraded Power Pivot data model file which had already been saved in the new SharePoint 2013 instance:












4) Then I saved my [report.rdl] file in that opened .zip archive; changed the .zip back to .rdlx and saved it in my new SharePoint 2013 Power View gallery.

There were a few gotchas that I needed to adjust in my upgraded Powev Pivot data model after this. What happened that during the data model upgrade all my custom column renaming and sorting were lost and this resulted in breaking some of the relationships within the data model and thus my adjusted Power View report didn't show all the charts at they were in the old SharePoint 2010 environment. But with a few adjustments to the data model, the new Power View report looked exactly like the original one with only difference that now it was in SharePoint 2013 environment.

It worked, and it worked well for me 🙂 

Happy data adventures!

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