Power Pivot Error

Problem

Recently I was revamping our production management tool with the new bells and whistles from Excel 2016. It was working beautifully until I removed a table linked to the Data Model.


When the table was removed before first removing it from the data model I had created the data model in Excel 2016 was continuing to search for it whenever I refreshed the data or tried to save the file.

This resulted in a really annoying error:

We couldn't Get Data from the Data Model. Here's the error message we got:
Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

I thought it was adorable how the error message was pushing responsibility off to another error message... hey I don't know what this means but you got this error message ... good luck.

I tried a few different ways to get to the data model and delete the reference to the now deleted table. Unfortunately, these attempts were as successful as singing career.  However, there was a solution I was able to use, though you may not like it.

Solution

I saw the problem as a communication error with a new feature in Excel 2016. So, being a fan of time travel, to fix it I took the worksheet up to 88mph and back to a simpler time, to 2003 to be exact.

I saved it as a former version of Excel.

This broke the link to the data model as well as all the other functions I had created with tools from the versions since 2003. It is the loss of the additional tools that makes this solution less than ideal. 

However, after re-opening the file and saving it again as a current version all of my data remained and I just had to add some slicers and other formatting changes and I was back up and running.

Have you had this issue? Leave a comment below and let me know how you solved it.