PowerPivot Data Refresh in Excel 2013
What options does a PowerPivot user have to refresh data in a PowerPivot model on the desktop, aka PowerPivot for Excel?
Prior to Excel 2013, the answer was just one - manual refresh by either clicking the Refresh button in the PowerPivot window or the Refresh button in the Existing Connections dialog box. Note that the Refresh button in the Excel ribbon doesn't work since Excel doesn't know anything about PowerPivot. Not does the checking the "Refresh data when opening the file" checkbox in the PowerPivot connection. In Excel 2010, these options won't reopen the PowerPivot connections to the data sources. Instead, the net effect is that they will simply refresh the pivot reports from the pivot cache which is not what you're after.
Read more...