What You Will Need
To begin working with PowerPivot for Excel, you first need to establish a development environment. Fortunately, the installation of PowerPivot for Excel is self-contained. The primary requirement for using the PowerPivot add-in is having Microsoft Office Excel 2010 installed. A wide spectrum of computers, from commodity desktops to high-end workstations can effectively run both Excel 2010 and the PowerPivot add-in. This makes a compelling argument for PowerPivot for Excel as a tool for business users who are not always on the leading edge of hardware acquisition. One of the most compelling demonstrations for PowerPivot for Excel is executing a sort on a 100-million row dataset deployed on an otherwise off-the-shelf Intel Atom-based netbook with 2 GB of RAM installed.
Note Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, there is no way to leverage PowerPivot for Excel within versions of Microsoft Excel from version 2007 and earlier.
Other than having Microsoft Office 2010 installed, other prerequisites may only become an issue depending on which operating system you are using. If you intend to develop PowerPivot for Excel solutions using an operating system other than Windows 7 (or Windows Server 2008 R2), you will need to install the .NET Framework version 3.5, Service Pack 1. If you are running Microsoft Vista or Windows Server 2008, you will be prompted to install a platform update specific to those systems, during the PowerPivot add-in installation process.
Anticipating demand from a population of Excel users who may not readily navigate Microsoft.com to locate the PowerPivot add-in, Microsoft created an additional site for prospective PowerPivot users at www.powerpivot.com.
When you go to download the file, you’ll be confronted with a choice: should you use the 32- or 64-bit version?