I was able to load a Power Pivot model with Pivot tables to PowerBI.com
And I was able to schedule refresh. And scheduled refresh successfully updates the data model daily.
However, the actual Pivot Table does not show new data. Users have to open the file in Excel and then refresh the pivot table manually. Aside from the manual inconvenience the much bigger problem is that the manual update kicks off a full refresh of the power pivot data model, which takes a very long time since I'm dealing with multiple large database tables.
Am I doing something wrong? Why can't the pivot table update itself without re-refreshing the data model? Is there a best practice here?