Great job Krista, I appreciate you taking the time to write this up as an article. Excel with and without PowerPivot connections is a familiar and flexible tool for my end users. I find that we are using the Report Manager (SSRS) less these days and relying more on direct connections between our rendering db and Excel. I had also cobbled together a similar solution by trial and error since upgrading to SQL 2008 R2 a couple of months ago.

Thanks sharing what you discovered with others, you have probably saved serveral readers out there a great deal of frustration.