In homage to Rob Collie’s blog posting style (yes!…he has style, he has grace, …) and of course the movie “Dude, Where’s my Car?”, let’s ask a new question: Dude, where’s my PowerPivot workbook?

And before you ask, we’re not talking about searching for the workbook somewhere in your “My Documents” folder, USB drive or SkyDrive.  What we’re referring to here is the fact that you went ahead and saved your PowerPivot workbook to the SharePoint, typically through the Excel Save As or Save to SharePoint function as noted in the posting: Uploading #PowerPivot for Excel workbook using “Save As” vs. SharePoint UI. 

What ultimately happens is that after you save your large workbook to SharePoint from Excel, and then when you go to your PowerPivot Gallery within SharePoint, you will see the error message below.

Dude, where’s my PowerPivot workbook?

So here’s the answer – its most likely still being uploaded.   As noted in the blog post Uploading #PowerPivot for Excel workbook using “Save As” vs. SharePoint UI, remember that when you Save to SharePoint:

• The workbook is initially saved to a local cache folder: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\14.0
• The local cache version of the file is then asynchronously posted to SharePoint.  This is done via the Cobalt protocol pushing the file in small chunks up to the SharePoint WFE.
• Meanwhile, you can continue using the real version of the workbook locally via your Excel client.

If you have a very large file, the reason for the error message is because the entire file has not been transferred from your local cache folder to SharePoint.    So when you click to look for it, because the SharePoint WFE hasn’t received all of the chunks to put it back together, it cannot find it hence the lovely message above.

Gee great….what can I do about it?

Patience…young Skywalker PowerPivot for SharePoint Information Worker

Yeah, the key thing here is to wait until the file has been successfully uploaded to SharePoint.  The advantage of asynchronous upload is that it doesn’t prevent you from continuing your work; the disadvantage is that you don’t actually know when the file is completely uploaded.

The Office Upload Center should tell you this but that’s not always a guarantee.  If you believe there is a problem with the upload, make sure to look at that first.  If you’re still running into problems, then refer to the post Uploading #PowerPivot for Excel workbook using “Save As” vs. SharePoint UI (third time the charm here) to debug, eh?!

Happy pivoting!