RE; Can 64bit and 32bit PowerBI be installed side by side?

[residentx]

Has anyone installed the 32bit and 64 bit side by side? It is affected when you uploaded into Office 365?

Any gotchas to be aware of? 

[greggyb · Accepted solution]

Why would you want to do this?

A .pbix file is bitness-agnostic. It can be freely shared between users with different bitness machines.

I would bet a lot of money that the servers hosting the PBI Service are all running 64-bit operating systems and versions of the Tabular engine for hosting PBI data models.

I'd say just go ahead and try installing both side-by-side to see what happens and share your results with the community.

[Anonymous]

Installing 32 bit after 64 bit removes the startup icon from 64bit from start menu

For me the main reason to work with 32 bit partly is because of 32 bit installation microsoft best practice advice for office installations on citrix servers.

therefore old excel files cannot be openend in combination with excel 32 bit and powerbi 64 bit.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-access-database-errors

still for other things 64 bit PowerBI is a better choice so we do want to have both installed side by side.

Details: "Excel Workbook: The 'Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0' provider is not registered on the local machine. The 64-bit version of the Access Database Engine 2010 Access Database Engine OLEDB provider may be required to read 'APPARATEN.xls'. To download the client software, visit the following site: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=285987."

[greggyb · Accepted solution]

Why would you want to do this?

A .pbix file is bitness-agnostic. It can be freely shared between users with different bitness machines.

I would bet a lot of money that the servers hosting the PBI Service are all running 64-bit operating systems and versions of the Tabular engine for hosting PBI data models.

I'd say just go ahead and try installing both side-by-side to see what happens and share your results with the community.

[JimT99]

Well one reason is when your company runs 32 bit MS Office you run up against issues accessing some of the 32 bit files with 64 bit Power BI. Yet in other cases 64 bit is the better option for acccesing SQL databases. This could all be solved if the company went to one 64 bit across the board but they haven't.

[residentx]

Can you elaborate on this bitness agnostic phenom? How is PowerBI able to do it but Excel/Office can't?

[residentx]

forget to check the email box and add a tag

[residentx]

Do want to make a final comment about the imported visuals? This is the final question I have now.

I was able to install them side by side, I renamed the folder for the 64 bit version.

[greggyb · Accepted solution]

Sure a comment about custom visuals - they're not ready for prime time yet for any of our clients' use cases. They don't work in organizational content packs yet.