Today I'll be installing the PI
Builder. That's our Microsoft Excel add-in
that let's us edit PI Points and AF Server objects in bulk.
So the first thing I'm going to do is
check for pre-requisities and I'll do that
by going to the product section here on our tech support website.
And the PI Builder
is actually part of our PI AF client install kit.
So it's going to be under the asset framework section here.
And system requirements will be
this tab and scrolling down
to PI Builder, since I'm running Windows
7, we can see here
that I meet that pre-requisite.
And since I have Microsoft Excel
2013 64 bit, I meet that pre-requisite as well.
So our installation should be
successful. So
we'll go ahead and download the kit.
And like I said earlier,
it's part of the PI AF 2015
client install kit. So just make sure
you download this particular asset framework client
kit here. If you are following
along, I'll go ahead and do that.
And I'm going to
save it to a folder where I can get it later.
This is important because we have to right click and
run it as administrator.
So after the installation, we'll just right click on
the install kit and run as administrator.
The important thing about this is it gives the install kit
full access to the registry and all of the
Excel system files.
So we'll go ahead and
click through this kit here.
I'm going to install it to the default extraction path.
That's fine for me.
Alright so this is everything that gets installed
with the AF client kit. But the most important thing is
this PI AF client 2015 R2. That's
going to be where the PI Builder
is. So we'll just click OK here.
Alright so since this is the first piece of PI software I've
installed on this machine, it's going to ask me for my default
servers. So we'll go and type those in right here.
And the default install path is fine.
Alright so this is the AF part of the install kit.
So we'll just make sure
that our PI Builder component is one of the
features that are definitely going to be installed here.
So it looks good, so I'll click next.
And then we see
here, here is the PI Builder.
So we'll click install.
So we can see
here that the AF client 2015
component was installed successfully.
So I actually need to restart
my computer here because I didn't have this Microsoft
Studio 2010 tools. So I'm going to go
ahead and restart.
And the final component of
the install is just this
set of wrappers. So we'll hit yes.
And we can see here that the client was
successfully installed. So we'll open up
Excel and check the status of our PI Builder.
You can see that we have successfully installed our
PI Builder ribbon. So let's
open it up and we can see here
here it is ready for us to use right
away. Now you may get
to a scenario where you don't see the PI Builder
ribbon. And there might be a couple of
reasons for that, not only limited to
after an install but sometimes if
you install a conflicting add-in or if you login
as a different user or if you install it without
full admin rights you might not get the ribbon.
So a way to troubleshoot that is to check the Excel
plug-ins. So we'll go into
file, options and in Excel
2013, the add-ins are right here.
And we can see the
PI AF Builder is listed here under active
add-ins and it's a COM add-in.
So we'll go to our
manage COM add-ins and hit go.
And we can see there
that the PI AF Builder is checked. So for
example if this is not checked, the
PI Builder ribbon won't show up.
So if you don't see the PI Builder ribbon
at all just double check that you've activated
the add-in under the
COM add-ins section. And
that that check is there.
So there it is after I've rechecked
it. So this is a
successful install of the PI Builder. If you are
following along in the series, in the next couple of videos
we will edit some PI Points and then make bulk edits to our AF
structure.