SharePoint Tip: Are your old Excel workbook taking a long time to load in SharePoint? Try updating them to Excel 2013 to take advantage of PowerPivot.
Whether you are using SharePoint Online or Server, SharePoint is able to store all sorts of files including previous versions of Office documents. However, in order to use some of the updated features in SharePoint you may need to update your Office document to the latest Office version. For more information about Office backward compatibility for SharePoint 2010 read Microsoft’s Business Productivity at Its Best white paper.
One new feature that was introduced in SharePoint 2010 and is subsequently available in SharePoint 2013 is Microsoft PowerPivot. PowerPivot can be used with SharePoint and Excel documents to work with over a million rows of data in seconds and integrate reusable data from different sources. PowerPivot is automatically available in SharePoint Online on Office 365. To use PowerPivot on Microsoft SharePoint Server it must be installed on your SQL Server. By upgrading your Excel document to the latest version of Excel, your Excel workbook can take advantage of PowerPivot and can load large workbooks in seconds instead of minutes.
For more information on how to try using PowerPivot today please visit Microsoft’s official PowerPivot website and How to download and install PowerPivot.