Microsoft Excel training

Use the two-minute check further up this page. As a rough guide: if writing a formula from scratch still makes you hesitate, start with Essentials. If you can write formulas but you copy techniques from colleagues without being sure why they work, that is Intermediate. If you build PivotTables without thinking and colleagues bring you their broken workbooks, that is Advanced. If your ticks came out spread across the groups, email us what you can already do and we will place you honestly rather than guessing.

One day each. Our courses run from 09:00 to 17:00, which is roughly five to six hours of teaching and practice once breaks are taken out. Most people take Essentials and Intermediate a few weeks apart rather than back to back, because the gap is where you apply the first one and find out what you did not understand.

Scheduled online courses are £249 per person per day excluding VAT, at every level. Classroom courses start from £299 and are priced by venue, shown against each date. Onsite and private courses are quoted separately and are usually better value from four people upwards. The price includes courseware, exercise files, a quick reference guide, a certificate of completion and three months of trainer support, and you can pay in full, in interest-free instalments with Klarna, or against a purchase order.

For a skill somebody will use every working day for the rest of their career, one day tends to pay for itself inside the first month. The cost of not doing it never shows up on a budget line, so it is easy to miss: an afternoon spent retyping figures that would not sort, a report sent to a client with the columns cut off, a number that was wrong for three months because a copied formula moved its reference and nobody could read the formula well enough to notice. None of that is fixed by buying new software.

Essentials is about understanding Excel: structure, navigation, formatting without breaking your data, writing and copying formulas, sorting, filtering and printing. Intermediate is where Excel starts saving you real time, with references used deliberately, logical functions, text and date handling, data cleaning, an introduction to PivotTables and clear charts. Advanced is about making the work reliable and repeatable, with lookups, dynamic ranges, PivotTables in depth, what-if analysis, reusable models and reporting other people can use. The comparison table above sets all three out side by side.

Not on these three days, and we would rather say so plainly than imply it. They are a different kind of skill and they need proper time rather than a rushed final hour. If that is genuinely what you need, tell us what you are trying to automate and we will talk about a private day built around it, or tell you if the honest answer is a different tool altogether.

No. These are practical skills courses taught on Vantage 365 courseware, and you receive a certificate of completion rather than a Microsoft credential. That is deliberate: the goal is that you can use Excel properly on Monday morning, not that you can pass a test about it. If a formal Microsoft credential matters to you, tell us and we will talk you through the Microsoft Office Specialist route.

Microsoft Excel for Microsoft 365 on Windows, which is what most organisations now run. Almost everything applies to older perpetual versions such as Excel 2019 and Excel 2021, and to Excel for Mac, with small differences in where things sit on the ribbon. Tell us when you book if your organisation is on something different and the trainer will cover the differences that matter to you.

Yes, and for Excel it is often the better option. Onsite and private virtual courses let us teach on your own version of Excel and use your own spreadsheets as the examples, and getting a team into the same habits on one day stops five different versions of the same report appearing every month. We can also run different levels on consecutive days so a mixed-ability team all get the day that fits them. Call 0121 269 8660 to talk it through.

No. Plenty of people take one and stop, because it covered what they needed. The pathway exists so that the courses join up cleanly for the people who do want to go further, not to sell three days to somebody who needs one. If you tell us what you are trying to be able to do, we will tell you how many days that actually takes.

Yes, and we would encourage it. There is time set aside on each course to look at a real file with the trainer, and it is often the most useful part of the day. Please check first that you are allowed to share it and remove anything confidential. If you would rather not, the exercise files cover exactly the same ground.

Tell us and we will move you, before the course or on the morning. It happens, it is easily fixed, and a delegate on the wrong day helps nobody. This is also why we put the two-minute check at the top of this page rather than burying it: catching it in advance is better for you and for the rest of the room.