Why Your Team Still Needs Excel Training (And How to Do It Right)
The Great Excel Exodus That Never Happened
You’ve probably heard it a dozen times in leadership meetings: “We need to move away from Excel.” IT departments push for enterprise solutions. Consultants sell you on the latest analytics platforms. Your team gets frustrated with “modern” tools that promise everything but deliver complexity.
Yet here’s what nobody wants to admit: Excel isn’t going anywhere. And that’s actually good news.
The Real Problem Isn’t Excel—It’s How We Use It
Most corporate training treats Excel like it’s still 2005. Cookie-cutter courses that teach basic formulas and pivot tables while ignoring the revolutionary capabilities that make Excel more powerful than ever. Meanwhile, your team members are downloading data from your expensive BI tools… straight into Excel spreadsheets.
Sound familiar?
The issue isn’t that Excel is outdated. The problem is that most organizations—and most training programs—are using Excel in outdated ways.
Excel and Power BI: Partners, Not Competitors
Here’s something your IT department might not have told you: Excel and Power BI aren’t competitors—they’re designed to work together. Your team can connect to Power BI models directly from Excel, maintaining all the familiar functionality they know and trust while accessing centralised, governed data.
This means you can:
- Start developing financial models in Excel with Power Pivot
- Test and refine your approach using familiar tools
- Scale successful models into Power BI for organisation-wide sharing
- Never lose the agility that makes Excel indispensable
Why Your Team Keeps Coming Back to Excel
Every enterprise tool on the market today includes one telling feature: “Export to Excel.” That’s not a coincidence. When business users need results tomorrow—not next quarter after IT prioritises their request—they turn to Excel because it works.
Your finance team doesn’t have time to wait for the perfect enterprise solution. Your analysts can’t pause their insights while IT manages thousands of support tickets. Excel fills the critical gap between business agility and enterprise governance.
Modern Excel Training That Actually Works
Forget the basic spreadsheet courses that everyone dreads. Today’s Excel training should focus on:
✅ Power Query Integration: Teaching your team to connect directly to data sources instead of copying and pasting from other systems.
✅ Power Pivot Mastery: Building proper data models that scale from individual analysis to department-wide insights.
✅ Collaboration Features: Leveraging Excel’s modern sharing and co-authoring capabilities that most users never discover.
✅ Power BI Integration: Showing how Excel becomes more powerful when connected to your existing BI infrastructure, not replaced by it.
The Training Your Team Actually Wants
Your employees are tired of sitting through generic Excel training that teaches them to make better pie charts. They want to solve real business problems with tools that enhance their existing workflows rather than disrupting them.
Modern Excel training should feel less like school and more like unlocking superpowers they never knew they had. When done right, it transforms frustrated users into confident analysts who can bridge the gap between business needs and IT capabilities.
Stop Fighting Excel. Start Leveraging It.
The most successful organisations aren’t trying to eliminate Excel—they’re making it work better with their existing technology stack. They’re training their teams to use Excel as a powerful front-end to enterprise data, not as a replacement for proper data governance.
Your team is already using Excel, whether you acknowledge it or not. The question is: Are you giving them the training they need to use it effectively, or are you forcing them to figure it out on their own?
Ready for Excel Training That Works?
If your team is frustrated with cookie-cutter training that ignores how modern Excel actually works in enterprise environments, it’s time for a different approach. Training that acknowledges Excel’s role in your technology ecosystem and teaches your team to leverage it properly, not apologise for using it.
Because the dirty secret of enterprise software is simple: Every tool promises to replace Excel, but they all end up exporting to it instead.
Looking for Excel training that actually addresses your team’s real-world challenges? Training that works with your existing technology instead of against it? Let’s talk about what modern Excel training should look like in your organization.
