A recent issue has come up that us geeks might find interesting. To minimize their expose to Office 2010, some folks are installing just the Excel 2010 app itself. On the surface that sounds like a good idea – only install what you need and don’t add bloatware if it isn’t needed (isn’t that the definition of bloatware? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloatware ).

The problem is that the PowerPivot Excel add in is written mainly in managed code. And the way managed code interfaces with Excel is through, you guessed it, VSTO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Tools_for_Office). Unfortunately VSTO is only installed if you select the “Office Shared Tools” option as part of your installation, or if you did a “Complete” installation like I always do. See this posting from Ron Pihlgren (a Test lead here in PowerPivot-land) http://blogs.msdn.com/ronpih/archive/2009/11/18/office-14-beta-2-powerpivot-for-excel-ctp3-you-must-install-office-shared-tools.aspx for more info.