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, since Power Query is the same engine.
- Not fit. Anyone who still rebuilds a PivotTable from scratch each month instead of refreshing one. 301 is the prerequisite, not a recommendation. And if the real task is stress-testing a forecast rather than automating a report, that’s 302.
Prerequisites: PivotTable-fluent. Comfortable with Tables, named ranges, and 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.
The day, block by block
- Read a query instead of guessing at it. The Power Query editor: the applied-steps panel, the formula bar, and the difference between the query and its result. This is the most important interface in modern Excel.
- Pull data in from wherever it actually lives. Extracting from Excel files, CSVs, web pages, and folders, plus connection types and how refresh behaves for each.
- Clean a mess once and have it stay clean next month. Transform steps: cleaning, splitting, merging, unpivoting, conditional columns, and parameterized queries. Repeatable steps that survive new data.
- Put the result where the rest of the workbook can use it. Load targets: connection-only, table, or data model, and how to choose the right one for the use case.
- Lay out a dashboard a non-analyst can read at a glance. Layout, KPI tiles, chart selection, interactivity through slicers, and accessibility for non-technical viewers.
- Hand the report off so it doesn’t break the week you’re away. Default folder paths, parameter queries, refresh failures, and 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, where 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 | From price (CAD) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Single-day primer (ETL only) | from $1,495 | Full day, 6 hr; groups of 4 to 8 |
| Two-day workshop (ETL + dashboards) | from $2,990 | Two days; groups of 4 to 8 |
| Custom BI on-ramp with your data | Quoted on call | Scoped to your pipelines |
Indicative bands for groups of 4–8. The group size is smaller than the other levels 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.
401 is the on-ramp out of Excel rather than a higher rung inside it. The skills here, Power Query and the data model, are the same ones Power BI runs on, so the natural next move is Power BI, a reporting database, or a scheduled refresh pipeline. The core ladder tops out at 302; 401 is where it points outward.
The full training catalogue shows how the Microsoft Office courses sit alongside the WordPress training track.