A modern analyst workspace in soft daylight: an external monitor on a stand displays an abstract dashboard with KPI tiles and a trend chart above a laptop showing a data grid.

You’re moving from spreadsheet work into reporting workflows. This is where Power Query, ETL, and dashboards earn their keep.

Who delivers this: Christopher Ross · Microsoft Excel and BI trainer · classroom and virtual training delivery since 2004 · MA Candidate, Learning and Technology, Royal Roads University

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.

What your manager will see different on Monday

  • The monthly report rebuilds itself with one click instead of two days of copy-paste-and-pivot from raw exports.
  • New data drops into the folder, the refresh runs, and the dashboard updates — without anyone editing a formula.
  • The reporting workflow survives the analyst being on vacation, because the Power Query steps are in the file and they are readable.
  • Source-file path changes stop breaking the report, because the queries are parameterized.
  • The conversation about whether to move to Power BI gets a real answer, because the team can show what their current Excel-native stack already does well.

Curriculum, in six themed blocks

  1. 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.
  2. ETL workflows — extract. From Excel files, CSVs, web pages, folders. Connection types and refresh behaviour.
  3. ETL workflows — transform. Cleaning, splitting, merging, unpivoting, conditional columns, parameterized queries. Repeatable steps that survive new data.
  4. ETL workflows — load. Connection-only, table, data model. Choosing the right load target for the use case.
  5. Dashboard design. Layout, KPI tiles, chart selection, interactivity through slicers, accessibility for non-technical viewers.
  6. 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

Training investment — 401-tier, up to 12 participants
FormatInvestment (CAD)
Half-day (3 hours, focused)$2,250
Full-day (6 hours, comprehensive)$3,750
Two half-days (split across one week)$4,250
401-tier is priced above the standard ladder because the work-along pace runs slower with real models and pipelines. In-person within Niagara / GTA: add $500/day. Custom-data or multi-cohort engagements — let’s scope it.

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.

Christopher Ross

Written by

Christopher Ross

I've been building WordPress sites since 2007 and on the open web since 1996. I've shipped editorial systems for the Postmedia national newspaper network and brand sites for Sherwin-Williams industrial brands, and I write about WordPress and editorial decisions from Fort Erie, Ontario.

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Common questions

How do you price this for a team?

Private on-site training: $2,250 per day for up to 3 participants, $175 per additional participant (maximum 10). Half-day: $1,400. Travel within 50 km of Fort Erie is included; beyond that, travel is billed at cost. Remote delivery: $1,800 per day. After a short discovery call I confirm the format, recommend the right starting level, and send a fixed quote.

Can you tailor this to our team's actual workbooks and templates?

Yes. If you can send me a sanitised example or two before the day — a real workbook, a recurring report, the spreadsheet someone always asks about — I build the exercises around it. People learn faster when the examples are theirs, and the workbook usually goes back to the team in better shape than it arrived.