Removing VSTO-Based Customizations from a PowerPivot Workbook

This article is a follow-up on a previous blog post titled "How to Build a VSTO-Based PowerPivot Workbook," which discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of building PowerPivot workbooks by using VSTO. A key VSTO advantage is that you can bring data from virtually any source into PowerPivot even if there is no suitable data provider, but a significant disadvantage is that Excel Services in SharePoint doesn't run the VSTO code. Among other things, this means that you cannot keep VSTO-based workbooks automatically updated by using the Scheduled Data Refresh feature of PowerPivot for SharePoint. Moreover, Excel Services displays warnings about unsupported and disabled features when viewing the workbook in the browser, such as for buttons, text boxes, and other such objects, as illustrated in the following screenshot, which shows the VSTO-based Analytics for Twitter workbook in Internet Explorer. Removing the VSTO customizations could help to improve the user experience, but how do you bring custom data into a PowerPivot workbook without VSTO if there is no direct data provider?