If running on Windows Server, make sure you have ‘Desktop Experience’ feature turned on

Oh the joys of SharePoint again. I just responded to an internal posting where someone was raising the issue that “Path not found” errors were being reported when Excel Desktop tried to publish a workbook to SharePoint. Again, this isn’t PowerPivot directly, but it can be reported as a PowerPivot problem if the workbook contains PowerPivot data.

The issue is that on Windows Server machines (Window Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2), the ‘Desktop Experience’ feature contains a required component for Excel (or any application posting content to SharePoint).

Normally you don’t see this because on a Windows client machine (Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP), Desktop Experience is turned on by default – but not for Server OS’s. The underlying component at issue here is WebDAV. Excel desktop need it for the publishing process because they post content to SharePoint as if SharePoint was a remote file share. Thus if you are going to run Excel desktop on a Windows Server OS and publish content to SharePoint – then you need ‘Desktop Experience’ turned on.

Enjoy!