You’re moving from spreadsheet work into reporting workflows. This is where Power Query, ETL, and dashboards earn their keep.
Who delivers this: I’ve delivered classroom, virtual, and onsite training across North America since 2004 — twenty-two years. MA Candidate, Learning and Technology, Royal Roads.
Excel 401 is the BI-on-ramp day for analysts who have outgrown manual copy-paste and one-off PivotTables. It teaches the Power Query workflow, ETL discipline, and dashboard design that turn raw exports into reporting that updates with one click.
Who this is for
- Fit. Analysts, reporting leads, and ops staff producing recurring reports from messy source data.
- Fit. Teams about to move into Power BI who want the Excel-native foundation first — Power Query is the same engine.
- Not fit. Anyone who hasn’t lived inside PivotTables yet. 301 is the prerequisite, not a recommendation.
Prerequisites: PivotTable-fluent. Comfortable with Tables, named ranges, structured references. If 301 felt new, take it first.
What you’ll be able to do after
- Build Power Query flows that extract, clean, shape, and load data — repeatedly, with one click.
- Combine data from multiple sources: Excel files, CSVs, web pages, folders of files.
- Design dashboards with KPI tiles, charts, and slicers that read at a glance.
- Maintain workbooks across path changes, refresh failures, and shared drives.
- Hand off reporting that survives without you in the room.
Curriculum, in six themed blocks
- Power Query, the editor. The applied-steps panel, the formula bar, the difference between query and result. Why this is the most important interface in modern Excel.
- ETL workflows — extract. From Excel files, CSVs, web pages, folders. Connection types and refresh behaviour.
- ETL workflows — transform. Cleaning, splitting, merging, unpivoting, conditional columns, parameterized queries. Repeatable steps that survive new data.
- ETL workflows — load. Connection-only, table, data model. Choosing the right load target for the use case.
- Dashboard design. Layout, KPI tiles, chart selection, interactivity through slicers, accessibility for non-technical viewers.
- Maintenance. Default folder paths, parameter queries, refresh failures, the lookups that break first when files move.
Real examples we’ll work through
- A monthly sales dashboard built from a folder of raw CSV exports — one refresh updates the whole report.
- A web-scraped pricing dataset refreshed on a schedule.
- A multi-region report combining six branch workbooks into one dashboard with regional slicers.
Format, duration, and pricing
| Format | Duration | Indicative price (CAD) |
|---|---|---|
| Two-day workshop (ETL + dashboards) | Two days | from $7,500 |
| Single-day primer (ETL only) | Full day (6 hr) | from $4,200 |
| Custom BI on-ramp with your data | Quoted on call | quoted |
Indicative bands for groups of 4–8 — smaller-than-typical group size on 401 because the work-along pace is slower with real ETL flows. Travel quoted separately for onsite outside Niagara. Final price confirmed on the discovery call.
Where this fits in the Microsoft Excel ladder
Shaped for: Analysts moving into reporting workflows with Power Query, ETL, and dashboard design.
Most learners come here from: Microsoft Excel Training 301.
This is the top of the Excel ladder. From here the natural next move is into adjacent territory rather than a higher number — Power BI, Tableau, or moving the workflow into a database.
The full training catalogue shows how the Microsoft Office courses sit alongside the WordPress training track.
