A Peek Inside: Updating data in your embedded PowerPivot workbook

Recently I have been seeing some threads about how data is updated in a PowerPivot workbook. As it turns out, this can be a pretty complicated technical situation, so lets start off with a general statement: There are only 2 ways to update the embedded data contained in a PowerPivot workbook:

1. Bring the workbook down to the client machine, use the PowerPivot Excel add-in and click on “refresh”, then republish the workbook back to SharePoint (which implies certain SharePoint rights to enable)
2. Use the build-in PowerPivot data refresh facility (which also implies certain SharePoint rights)

That is it.

But as you guess, there is more to the story.

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