1 hour timeout for data imports in Powerpivot for Excel

This article describes an issue you may face when your data import in Powerpivot for Excel takes longer than 1 hour. Typically you should not run into this type of issue because Powerpivot for Excel was designed as an interactive tool with moderate amounts of data in mind. 1 hour should give you ample time to import all the required data from a given data source.

However, if you are using queries that take a long time for execution or queries that deliver very large result sets, possibly in combination with a relatively slow provider/driver, then you may run into this limit. Typically we have seen this type of problem when trying to import large amounts of data (> 10 million rows) from an instance of Analysis Services. The recommended solution would be to import leaf level data directly from the original data source (typically a relational database). Imports from relational databases will usually have a much better performance and you can avoid the 1 hour timeout.