Microsoft Excel Essentials
Build a solid, reliable foundation in Excel: structure, formulas, formatting and the habits that prevent broken spreadsheets.
Nine structured online courses that take you from writing your first reliable formula to publishing a data model that a whole department depends on. Self-paced video lessons, real exercise files, and the modelling discipline that separates a spreadsheet that works from one that survives.
✓ Lifetime access on individual plans ✓ Exercise files included ✓ 14-day refund policy
A formula copied from a colleague. A shortcut picked up under deadline pressure. A template inherited from someone who left two years ago. It works — until the day it quietly does not, and nobody can say why.
A row gets inserted and a range no longer covers it. A lookup returns the wrong record because the source was re-sorted. The file still opens, the numbers still look plausible, and the error travels straight into a decision. Broken spreadsheets rarely announce themselves — that is exactly what makes them expensive.
Export the report. Delete the header rows. Split the reference column. Fix the dates that imported as text. Remove the duplicates. Paste it into the template. Two hours gone, every month, for work that a computer should be doing. Most professionals lose several full days a year to a loop that could be built once and refreshed with one click.
Twelve charts on one page, six colours with no meaning, no target to compare against, and no way to tell in three seconds whether things are going well or badly. The work was real; the impact was zero. Reporting fails for design reasons far more often than technical ones.
The workbook that runs the monthly close has 40 tabs, no documentation and a formula 300 characters long. It works because one person knows where the bodies are buried. When that person is on holiday, or leaves, the business discovers exactly how much risk it was carrying.
VLOOKUP where XLOOKUP is available. Nested IF statements where IFS or a lookup table would be clearer. Manual copy-paste where Power Query would refresh automatically. Excel has changed enormously in the last decade, and most people's habits have not moved with it.
Sales reports 4,120 active customers. Finance reports 3,880. Both are right, because nobody wrote down what "active" means. The meeting is then spent reconciling numbers instead of deciding anything. Business intelligence begins with definitions, not dashboards.
Every course follows the same structure, because it is the structure that makes skills stick: understand the problem, see it solved on real data, then solve it yourself on a file you can keep.
We do not teach functions in isolation on invented three-row tables. Each course follows a coherent, realistic dataset — sales transactions, a product catalogue, a customer list, a calendar — from raw export through to a finished output. You see how a decision made in lesson 4 affects what is possible in lesson 30, which is exactly how it works in a real job and exactly what isolated tutorials cannot show you.
Every lesson that involves building something comes with a starter file and a completed solution file. You work in your own copy at your own speed, and when something does not match, you open the solution and compare. Watching someone else use Excel builds recognition; doing it yourself builds skill. The files are yours to keep and reuse at work.
Before a technique is demonstrated, the course explains what problem it solves and what the alternatives cost. You learn why a proper Excel Table beats a plain range, why a star schema beats one wide sheet, why a measure beats a calculated column. Understanding the reason is what lets you choose correctly six months later, on a problem we never covered.
Some lessons explain when not to use the thing being taught. When a macro is the wrong answer and Power Query is right. When a dashboard should be a one-line email instead. When an AI assistant will confidently hand you a broken formula. Training that only ever says "and here is another feature" produces people who over-engineer everything.
We teach XLOOKUP, FILTER, LET, LAMBDA and dynamic arrays, because that is what Microsoft 365 gives you today. Where a feature is not available in Excel 2019 or 2021, the lesson says so explicitly and demonstrates the alternative — usually INDEX/MATCH or a helper column — so the course works whatever version your employer has standardised on.
Throughout the courses, we build files that someone else could inherit: separated inputs and calculations, named ranges, a documentation tab, consistent formatting, and no 300-character formulas. This is the difference between being useful and being indispensable in the bad way — and it is the part almost no online course covers.
Each course stands on its own, and together they form a complete path from spreadsheet fundamentals to published business intelligence. Every course page lists its level, prerequisites, full module breakdown and learning outcomes before you buy.
Build a solid, reliable foundation in Excel: structure, formulas, formatting and the habits that prevent broken spreadsheets.
Dynamic arrays, advanced lookups, financial and statistical functions, and models that are built to be audited.
Stop cleaning the same file every month. Build repeatable transformations that refresh with one click.
Relationships, star schemas and DAX measures — the data model behind every serious Excel report.
From raw data to a published, refreshing report that stakeholders actually open.
The concepts behind the tools: KPIs that mean something, metric definitions, and reporting that drives decisions.
Layout, colour, chart choice and hierarchy — how to build a dashboard people read instead of ignore.
Use AI assistants for analysis, documentation and drafting — with the verification habits that keep you safe.
Macros, VBA fundamentals and Office Scripts — automating the repetitive work that eats your week.
You do not need all nine courses, and you certainly do not need them in catalogue order. These are the four paths that cover almost everyone who comes to us.
For: you use Excel every day but never learned it deliberately. You can build a SUM and a chart; you avoid anything with a dollar sign in it.
Order: Excel Essentials → Advanced Excel → Power Query.
Roughly 20 hours. By the end you write formulas that survive changes to the sheet, you can clean an ugly export without dread, and the monthly report that used to take an afternoon refreshes with one click. This is the highest-value path for most office professionals, and the one we would recommend if you only ever take three courses.
For: Excel is not the problem; scale is. You are stitching several sources together and the workbook is starting to groan.
Order: Power Query → Power Pivot → Power BI.
Roughly 22 hours. You move from lookups to a real data model, learn DAX properly — including the row-context/filter-context distinction most people skip and then quietly get wrong forever — and finish by publishing a report that refreshes on a schedule and respects row-level security.
For: your numbers are correct but your reports do not land. People open them, nod, and change nothing.
Order: Business Intelligence Foundations → Dashboard Design → Power BI.
Roughly 19 hours. You start with definitions and KPI design, move to the craft of layout, chart choice and colour with meaning, and end with the tool. Deliberately in that order: a beautiful dashboard built on a badly defined metric is worse than no dashboard, because it makes the wrong number persuasive.
For: you already know Excel well. What you want back is the time spent on work that repeats.
Order: Power Query → Automation with Excel → AI for Productivity.
Roughly 16 hours. Query pipelines for anything data-shaped, VBA and Office Scripts for the rest, and a frank treatment of where AI assistants genuinely help versus where they generate confident nonsense you then have to debug. Includes the verification routine we consider non-negotiable.
Write to support@brevora.com describing your role, the version of Excel you have and the single report that causes you the most pain. We will reply within 24 business hours on business days with an honest recommendation — including telling you if one course is enough and you do not need a larger plan.
No cohorts, no start dates, no scheduling. You buy, you get access, you learn when it suits you.
Pick a single course, a three-course path, or full catalogue access. Every plan and everything it includes is listed on the pricing page before you pay, with no upsell at checkout.
Checkout is handled over a secure encrypted connection by our payment provider. You then receive your access details by email at the address used for the order.
Stream the lessons, download the exercise files, and work along in your own copy. Your progress is saved automatically so you can stop mid-module and pick up later.
Complete a course and your certificate is issued in your student area. The exercise and template files stay yours, to reuse on real work the following Monday.
We would rather lose a sale than have someone discover after paying that the product was not what they assumed.
Our courses assume you have real work to do and limited time. Every technique is introduced through a problem you have probably already had.
Month-end close, budget versus actual, variance analysis and cash flow forecasting. You will build models with a clean assumptions block, an audit trail, and formulas a reviewer can follow — plus the Power Query pipelines that end the manual re-keying of the same trial balance export.
Stock levels, lead times, service rates and capacity planning. Consolidating exports from systems that do not talk to each other is a Power Query problem, and once solved it stays solved. Dashboard Design then covers presenting operational data so exceptions are visible at a glance.
Pipeline reporting, cohort analysis, channel performance and attribution. Power Pivot lets you combine CRM exports, ad platform data and revenue in one model, so you stop rebuilding the same comparison every quarter and start answering follow-up questions in the meeting itself.
Headcount, turnover, absence and recruitment funnels. Small datasets, high sensitivity, and a strong need for definitions everyone agrees on — which is why we would send most HR analysts to Business Intelligence Foundations before any tool course.
You are the finance team, the operations team and the analyst. The Excel Essentials → Advanced Excel → Power Query path gives you a reliable monthly reporting routine you can run in under an hour, without hiring anyone or subscribing to another SaaS tool.
You know your data but the organisation is moving to Power BI, or you are moving to an organisation that already has. Power Query → Power Pivot → Power BI gets you productive on the Microsoft stack without re-learning concepts you already understand.
Individual plans are a one-off payment with lifetime access to the courses they include. No recurring charge, no expiry, no card kept on file for a renewal you forgot about.
Pick a single course and work through it at your own pace, with lifetime access to that course and its downloadable files.
Three courses of your choice — enough to cover a full path such as Excel Essentials, Advanced Excel and Power Query.
Full access to every course in the catalogue, including all future courses published while your access is active.
Everything in Professional, plus direct guidance: a review of your own workbook or dashboard, and two one-to-one sessions.
Business and team plans from €70 per seat — see all plans and the full comparison table.
All prices are in euros and include VAT where applicable. Every purchase is covered by our 14-day refund policy.
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Full refund within 14 days of purchase, on request to support@brevora.com. The conditions are written out in full on our Refund Policy page — including the specific cases where a refund can be declined.
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Course titles tell you very little. Here is what each one contains, who it is genuinely for, and — just as usefully — who should skip it.
This is the foundation course, and it is deliberately unhurried. It covers workbook structure, Excel Tables and structured references, absolute and relative referencing, the core logic and lookup functions, cleaning imported data, formatting for readability, and protecting a sheet so a colleague cannot silently break it. If you have used Excel for years without ever being taught it, this is where the gaps get filled — and there are almost always more of them than people expect. The single most common piece of feedback on a course like this is that the referencing module explained something the learner had been getting wrong for a decade. Skip it only if you already write mixed references without thinking and know why a Table beats a plain range.
Advanced does not mean obscure. It means the modern function set — dynamic arrays, FILTER, UNIQUE, SORT, LET, LAMBDA — combined with the modelling discipline that makes a workbook auditable: separated input, calculation and output layers, no hard-coded constants buried inside formulas, and a documentation habit. It also covers scenario analysis, the core financial functions, and how to audit a model somebody else wrote, which is a genuinely different skill from writing one yourself. Take it after Essentials, or straight away if you are already comfortable with formulas and your problem is that your files have grown beyond what you can confidently check.
If you take only one course after the fundamentals, make it this one. Power Query converts the manual monthly clean-up into a recorded sequence that replays on demand. Connect to files, folders, workbooks and databases; remove junk rows by condition rather than position; split and transform columns; unpivot a cross-tab report into usable tabular data; merge and append instead of copy-pasting between sheets; and combine every file in a folder into one refreshable table. The course also covers the three habits that make queries fragile — removing rows by position, hard-coding file paths and renaming columns too early — because a query that breaks every month is worse than no query at all. For most office professionals this is the largest single time saving available anywhere in Excel.
This is where Excel stops behaving like a spreadsheet and starts behaving like a reporting tool. Instead of one enormous flat table held together with lookups, you build a proper model: fact tables, dimension tables, a date table, and relationships between them. Then you write DAX measures once and reuse them everywhere. The course spends real time on row context versus filter context, because that distinction is the one almost every self-taught DAX user skips and then quietly gets wrong forever — producing measures that are correct in the total and wrong in the breakdown. It is the most conceptually demanding course in the catalogue and the one that changes most about how you think.
Power BI takes the modelling skills from Power Query and Power Pivot and adds distribution: reports that live online, refresh on a schedule, and can be opened on a phone during a meeting. The course follows one dataset end to end, from messy source files through modelling and DAX to visual design, interaction with slicers and drill-through, publishing to the Service, scheduled refresh, and row-level security so that each viewer sees only their own data. It closes with performance: how to find out why a report is slow, and the handful of causes responsible for most of it. It assumes Power Query; Power Pivot is strongly recommended first.
Deliberately tool-agnostic, and the course we most often recommend people take first, before touching any software. It covers what separates a metric from a KPI from a diagnostic; how to write a metric definition two departments can agree on; KPI trees that connect daily activity to top-level outcomes; leading versus lagging indicators; the statistical traps that make business reporting misleading; a reporting cadence for daily, weekly and monthly audiences; and a practical triage order for data quality problems. If your organisation has ever spent a meeting reconciling two versions of the same number instead of making a decision, this course is about that meeting.
A craft course rather than a tool course. It covers defining the audience and the decision before opening any software; choosing charts honestly for comparison, composition, distribution and trend; building a visual hierarchy so the most important number is unmistakable within three seconds; using colour with meaning and keeping dashboards readable for colour-blind viewers; adding context so a number is never presented alone; cutting the visuals that add noise; and testing with a real user rather than trusting your own familiarity with your own work. Dashboards fail for design reasons far more often than technical ones, and this is the course that addresses those reasons.
An honest treatment of assistants for analytical work. It covers where they genuinely help — explaining an inherited formula, drafting documentation, turning a vague stakeholder request into a written specification, suggesting an approach — and where they fail, which is more specific than "sometimes wrong": fabricated functions that do not exist, plausible logic that is subtly incorrect and errors nothing, and outdated syntax drawn from older material. The core of the course is a verification routine applied to every generated calculation: read it and explain it back, test on data where you know the answer, test the edges, cross-check the total by a different method, and only then put it into a live model. It also covers what not to paste into a public tool.
Starts with the macro recorder, moves into readable VBA — variables, loops, the object model, error handling — and covers Office Scripts and Power Automate for cloud-based workflows. Practical outputs include assembling a monthly report, applying formatting, exporting to PDF and emailing the result. It ends with a section on when not to automate: the maintenance cost, the key-person risk of a macro only one person understands, and the many cases where Power Query or a rethink of the process is the better answer. Take it after Advanced Excel, and only when you have identified work that genuinely repeats.
Nobody benefits from an inflated promise here, so here is what we honestly observe.
You do not need to finish a course to benefit from it. The referencing module in Excel Essentials, or the first folder-combine query in Power Query, will change something about your work the next morning. We deliberately front-load the highest-value material so that this happens early, because a course you abandon in week three has still paid for itself if the first three lessons fixed a real problem.
Watching video is not learning; doing the exercises is. Across the three-course core path, expect roughly 20 hours of video and a similar amount again actually building things. Spread over evenings or a couple of hours a week, that is around two to three months to reach the point where you stop looking things up for routine work and start reaching for the right tool by instinct.
Fluency comes from applying the skills to problems nobody designed for teaching — your own messy data, your own awkward stakeholders, your own edge cases. No course produces this on its own, and any provider claiming otherwise is selling you something. What a structured course does is compress the trial-and-error phase dramatically, and stop you spending two years reinforcing a habit that will eventually cause an expensive error.
We cannot promise you a job, a promotion, a salary band or a business outcome. Those depend on your market, your organisation, your timing and a dozen other things no training company controls. What we can say with confidence is that spreadsheet and reporting fluency is a durable, transferable and widely-demanded skill, and that having it removes a category of daily friction from professional work. That is a real benefit, and it is enough — it does not need exaggerating.
It is a reasonable objection and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales pitch.
Free tutorials are genuinely good at one thing: answering a specific question you already know how to ask. "How do I remove duplicates", "what does INDEX MATCH do", "why is my date showing as a number" — for all of these, a free video will help you in four minutes and you should absolutely use it. We publish free articles ourselves for exactly this reason.
What free content cannot give you is sequence. It is optimised for the search query, which means it teaches techniques in the order people happen to look them up, not the order in which they build on one another. You end up with a collection of tricks and no underlying structure, which is precisely why the knowledge does not transfer when the problem is slightly different from the tutorial you watched.
It also cannot give you the second thing that matters: knowing what you do not know. You cannot search for a concept you have never heard of. Nobody searches for "filter context in DAX" before discovering, painfully, that their measure is correct in the total and wrong in every breakdown. A structured course tells you the thing exists before it costs you a day.
The third gap is realistic practice material. Tutorials demonstrate on clean five-row tables. Your work arrives with a title block above the headers, dates stored as text, three spellings of the same customer name and a stray total row. Learning on clean data and then meeting real data is a large part of why people conclude they are "bad at Excel" when in fact they were simply never shown the messy case.
And the fourth is judgement. Free content almost never says "do not use this here". It has no incentive to. A structured course can — and should — tell you when a macro is the wrong answer, when a dashboard should have been an email, and when a helper column beats a clever single formula. That judgement is the difference between someone who knows many features and someone who is genuinely good.
If some of the terms on this page are unfamiliar, that is normal and it is not a barrier. Here is what each one means in ordinary language.
A tool built into Excel that records the steps you take to clean and reshape data, so they can be replayed on a new file with one click. It is the answer to doing the same manual clean-up every month. Available in Excel 2016 and later on Windows, and in Microsoft 365 on Mac.
A way of storing several related tables inside a workbook and defining relationships between them, instead of merging everything into one wide sheet with lookups. It handles far more rows, is faster, and makes your calculations reusable rather than duplicated.
The formula language used in Power Pivot and Power BI. It looks similar to Excel formulas but works on whole tables rather than individual cells, which is why it behaves differently and why it needs learning rather than guessing.
A standard way of organising a data model: one central table of events (sales, transactions, tickets) surrounded by descriptive tables (customers, products, dates). It is called a star because of the shape a diagram makes. It is the layout that makes reporting fast and calculations simple.
A fact table records things that happened, with numbers you add up. A dimension table describes the things involved — who the customer is, what the product is called, which month a date falls in. Facts are what you measure; dimensions are how you slice them.
A calculation written once and reused anywhere in your reporting, which recalculates automatically depending on what the viewer has filtered. The alternative — a calculated column — computes a fixed value per row and takes up space. Knowing which to use is a substantial part of Power Pivot.
A modern Excel feature where one formula returns many results, which "spill" into the cells below or beside it. FILTER, UNIQUE and SORT are the common ones. They replace a whole category of awkward older constructions. Microsoft 365 and Excel 2021 only.
Turning a report laid out with months across the top into a proper table with one row per month. Human-readable cross-tab layouts are almost impossible to analyse; unpivoting converts them into something a pivot table or a model can actually use. It is a single click in Power Query and it unlocks everything downstream.
A key performance indicator: a metric chosen because it is tied to a decision or an objective, with a target attached. Not every number is a KPI, and treating them all as one is how dashboards end up with thirty figures and no message.
A setting in Power BI that filters what each viewer sees based on who they are, so a regional manager opening the shared report sees only their own region. One report, many audiences, no duplicated files.
For Excel Essentials, no — it assumes you can open a workbook and nothing more. Advanced Excel, Power Query and Dashboard Design assume you are comfortable with formulas and basic spreadsheet structure. Power Pivot and Power BI assume you have completed Power Query or already work with data models. Every course page states its level and prerequisites clearly.
Microsoft 365 is recommended, because dynamic array functions such as FILTER and XLOOKUP are only available there. Excel 2019 and 2021 work for most of the material, and where a feature is version-dependent the lesson says so and shows the alternative approach. Power Query is included in Excel 2016 and later on Windows. Power BI Desktop is a free download for Windows.
All courses are pre-recorded video lessons that you follow at your own pace, with downloadable exercise files so you can work along in your own copy. The Ultimate plan adds two scheduled one-to-one video sessions, and Business plans include a group onboarding call.
Individual plans include lifetime access to the courses in your plan. There is no recurring charge and no expiry. Business seats run for twelve months from purchase and are renewable. Premium Support is a monthly add-on you can cancel at any time.
Yes. A certificate of completion is issued for each course you finish, showing your name, the course title, the number of hours and the completion date. It is a certificate of completion issued by Brevora Ltd, not a regulated or accredited qualification, and we say so plainly rather than implying otherwise.
You may request a full refund within 14 days of purchase. Write to support@brevora.com with your order reference and we will process it, normally within five business days. The full policy, including the specific cases where a refund can be declined, is set out on our Refund Policy page.
Yes, for Business plans. We can issue an invoice against a purchase order and accept bank transfer. Write to support@brevora.com with your company details, the number of seats and any procurement reference you need on the invoice.
Nine courses, 56 hours of video, exercise files you keep, and a 14-day refund policy if it is not what you needed.
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