I have been struggling to find a way or method of creating a "thin" and "core" file setup with using PowerPivot and a DataModel. Most of the information I am reading seems to point to older versions of Excel and Sharepoint, and I have been unable to get this to work.

Our Company is using Office 365 with SharePoint Online. I am not a SharePoint admin for our Company, but from what I can tell our SharePoint Online does not have a PowerPivot service running, but also unsure how to actually determine that.

We also do not have a 'Pro' license for Power BI. I do have Power BI Desktop, but still unsure how to share any of that data.

I am working at creating an ExcelWork with a PowerPivot DataModel that is quickly growing in size, currently about 30MB. That is the compressed model only, with no tables or pivots actually in the workbook file, and it will just continue to grow.

I've tried taking the workbook with data model and putting in on our sharepoint site. I have even learned how to have the source data of that Model be linked to files also on Sharepoint. But I have not found a way to connect to that data model to make a "thin" file. I did try and save that File back to my local PC, but there seems to no way to change the connections.

Does anyone have any experience doing this successfully?

Thank you,
PT