Excel is crashing during showing "Loading Data model" on starting

athalekar I've been having this problem also and over the last few days have tried various remedies mentioned here an elsewhere, and tried different orders or ways of doing things.  Here is what finally seems to work for me:

• Open Excel in safe mode.  I do this by going to the Run command and entering "excel /safe"
• Once in safe mode of Excel, open my file from my PC
• From the Data Menu at the top, click on Queries and Connections.  This will open the Queries and Connections window, but also loads the Data Model.  (this seems to be the key step, or key order.  If I just try to refresh a pivot table that is connected to the data model before doing this step, the data model fails to load)
• With the Queries and Connections window still open, I now right-click one of my PowerPivot tables, and down at the status at the bottom, I know it's successful when I start seeing "Working..." followed by "Retrieving data...."  It does not do the "Loading Data Model..." step because it already successfully did that when opening the Queries and Connections.

So, anyhow.....not sure if this works for everyone, but it was the only way I could successfully refresh my file after many crashes/closes and lots of trial and error.