Share your PowerPivot file with Excel 2007 users

Just a quick tip if you want to share your PowerPivot files but you are the only one in the organisation who already has the luck to have office 2010 with PowerPivot and you don’t have SharePoint 2010.

I have this PowerPivot file that i want to share:

We now want to loose all PowerPivot specifics like the data file and all the DAX stuff. The nice thing is that they integrated PowerPivot 100% on top of default Excel functionality as you can see in this diagram (taken from Ms PowerPivot I cannot find anymore ):

As you can see in this schema a custom XML part is added to the default XLSX structure.

Now the easy thing is how to get rid of the PowerPivot stuff. You can just save you file as a Excel 97 – 2003 filetype:

Then you have just the excel with data as you saved it left (you don’t have slicers of course):

So in short, create a powerpivot app without slicers or Excel 2010 visibility and save it as Excel 2007 and voila you have a readable PowerPivot report for your excel 2007 users (and very small since the VertiPaq database is removed with the conversion).