Category: Licensing

Ginger Grant points out that Business Analytics Features are no longer in all versions of Excel:

Looking at this graphic, this is no way lists all of the versions of Excel which Microsoft sells. What about Office 365 Enterprise E1? Surely you would get Power Pivot functionality with that right? No. How much more money is Power Pivot going to cost you? Well, if you have Office 365, you are paying $8 a month for the Office software, including Excel. There is no guarantee that spending more money will provide Power Pivot though. Office 365 ProPlus, which has Power Pivot, will run you $12 a month. If you have Office Small Business Premium, which runs $12.50 a month you won’t get Power Pivot. Check the version of Excel 2016 by going to File->Account then look at what is listed. If the version isn’t Office 365 Pro Plus or one of the other versions listed in the graphic, there will be no way to make Power Pivot appear.

Based on Ginger’s explanation this seems like something that will be very confusing for some Excel users.

Denny Cherry thinks Windows Server 2016 pricing changes won’t matter that much:

So looking at this chart we can see that any machine with less than 8 cores per socket and two sockets or less will cost you exactly the same as it will today.  Also any machine with one socket and less than 16 cores will also cost the same as it costs today.

I’ll admit that I don’t know much about licensing, but rumblings at my company are that our server licensing costs are going to go up significantly.  As always, check with one of the four people on Earth who understand Microsoft licensing.