Important: Versions and compatibility - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now before we dive in it's important to talk about versions and compatibility. A couple important things to note here: Power Pivot is currently not available for Mac and it's only available in certain versions of Excel for Windows. So first thing's first, if you want to see a full, current list of compatible versions check out support.office.com. I'm showing you a full link here with a short code version or you can simply Google where is Power Pivot, and you'll land at this page here. And this site lays out all of the versions of Office and Excel that contain Power Pivot and these other Business Intelligence tools. So, take a look, make sure that your version is compatible before you go on with the course. Now a few other quick considerations: number one, Power Pivot does work best with a 64-bit version of Excel. Now it's not critical, you can run Power Pivot with a 32-bit version of Excel, it's just that 64-bit has access to more processing power and more memory. So it's a bit faster and a bit more stable. If you are planning to make that upgrade to 64-bit, make sure that you're running a 64-bit operating system and that you've updated Office to the 64-bit version as well. One thing about Power Pivot is that the menus, features, and tools have all evolved considerably over time, especially since it was first introduced in 2010. So what that means is that what you see on your screen may and often will differ slightly from what you see on mine. But that said, the fundamental skills and the concepts that we're covering are universally applicable. And then finally, even if you do have a compatible version of Excel, keep in mind that you may need to enable the Power Pivot and/or the Power Query plug-ins to access some of the tools that we'll be using in this course, and you can access those add-ins through the File, Options, Add-Ins menu under the Manage: COM Add-Ins section. So let me show you exactly what that looks like in Excel. So when you're in the Excel interface, if you have a compatible version, but you don't see this Power Pivot tab, what you can do is head to File, go all the way down to Options, and under the Add-Ins tab here on the left you'll see a Manage dropdown at the bottom where you can select COM Add-Ins and press Go, and you should see Power Pivot listed right there. Microsoft Power Pivot for Excel. You can check that box and press OK, and you should see the tab populate right away. Now last thing I'll point out here, if you into your File menu and dropdown to Account, this is where you can see exactly what version of Office or Excel that you're running. So, in this case I'll be running on Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus, and then if you go down to this About Excel button you can see right at the header that I'm running a 64-bit version of the program. So there you go, that's how you can check your Excel specs. So again, I'd recommend taking a minute, double check the version you're running, make sure that you can access that Power Pivot tab, and then once you're set, we'll be ready to roll.