There are three ways to buy Excel training for a team: seats in a public webinar or classroom, licences to a self-paced video library, or one onsite session at your office. If several people need the same skills, work in the same building, and use the same files, book the onsite session. Here is the arithmetic behind that advice, so you can check it against your own quotes, and the two cases where I would tell you to buy something else.
The three options, plainly
All three teach Excel, and the topic lists look nearly identical on every provider's page. What separates them is what happens to the learning afterward, and what the day costs once you count everything.
| Format | You pay for | Whose date, whose files | Where it fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public webinar or class | A seat per person, plus travel for a classroom; each person blocks a day | The provider's date, the trainer's sample workbook, a room of strangers | One or two people, one topic |
| Self-paced video | A licence per person to a lesson library | Any time, a sample workbook, nobody in the room | Refreshing a skill learned properly once |
| Onsite session | One price for the whole group | Your date, your workbooks, your machines, your people together | Several people, same building, same files |
What a webinar actually costs you
The per-seat fee is the number that shows up in the budget request, and it is the smallest part of the total.
Multiply the per-seat figure by the number of staff who need the training. Then add the part nobody puts on the purchase order: each of those people is out for a day, on the provider's date rather than yours. If the only session is the third Tuesday and the third Tuesday is when your payables run, you send people anyway or you wait for the next one.
Then add the travel, if it is a classroom seat rather than a webinar: mileage, parking, sometimes a hotel if the nearest session is in Toronto and you are not.
Then add the part that decides whether the money worked: the follow-through. A public class teaches on a sample workbook built by the trainer. Your staff learn a lookup formula against a made-up product list. Then they come back to the real workbook with the merged cells, the sixteen tabs, and the column that has been text instead of numbers since somebody pasted it in from the old system. Nothing they practised looks like that, so the new habit has nowhere to land.
Where self-paced video genuinely wins
Self-paced video is excellent for one specific job: refreshing a skill someone already learned once, at the moment they need it. If a staff member half-remembers how to group a PivotTable by month, a four-minute video is the correct tool and a training day is overkill.
Where it struggles is starting from zero, because getting stuck in Excel is silent. Copy a formula down a column without locking the reference and every row still returns a number, just the wrong one. The video cannot see that nobody noticed. Someone in the room can.
What changes when the instructor comes to you
Think about learning to drive. You can watch videos about parallel parking, and you can take a lesson in the driving school's car on its practice route. Both help. Neither is the same as an instructor beside you in your own car, on your road to work, saying "no, not that lane, and here is why."
Onsite training is the instructor in your car. We open your budget template, not a sample one. When someone says "but ours has the department codes in column A and it breaks the total," we fix that, in front of everyone, and the fix is now a thing your team owns. If someone rebuilds the same report from a blank sheet every month because they never trusted the version with the formulas in it, that gets caught on day one. That catch alone is worth the session.
Onsite training is the instructor in your car.
You also get the date on your terms. Nobody travels. If the session runs from nine to three at your boardroom table, the team is back at their desks the same afternoon, on the machines they just trained on.
The arithmetic, using my published prices
I publish pricing on every course page. The Excel levels are listed at $1,495 to $2,990 CAD plus HST per session. That is a price for the group, not per seat, and where it lands in the range depends on group size and scope. You get the number in writing before anything is booked, with no setup fees underneath it.
The rule of thumb to forward to finance: divide the session price by your headcount, then compare that to the public seat price before travel and lost days. At $1,495 for six people the session works out to about $249 each; at $2,990 for ten it is $299 each. If the seat you were quoted costs more than that, the onsite session is the cheaper option, and it is the one taught on your files.
An honest version of when not to book me
If the real problem is a broken workbook rather than a skills gap, training is the wrong purchase. A workbook held together with hidden columns and a macro nobody remembers writing needs a rebuild, not a class. Fix the workbook first, then train the people who will maintain it.
If you have one power user who already needs 401-level work, Power Query and a real data pipeline, and the rest of the team needs 101, do not put them in the same room. Book two sessions at the right levels rather than one session that bores half the group and loses the other half.
And if your finance team is mid-close, or the busiest week of the quarter is the only one free on the calendar, wait. A group watching the clock does not absorb an absolute reference no matter how well it is taught.
Picking the right level
The Excel track runs as a ladder. Read the "who this is for" section on each page and pick the one where your staff sit. Or tell me what they do with Excel now and I will point you at the level.
- Microsoft Excel training 101: formulas, absolute references, and printing a sheet that reads cleanly.
- Microsoft Excel training 201: charts, formulas that survive a column insert, and a first working macro.
- Microsoft Excel training 301: Tables, lookups, and PivotTables for turning long lists into answers.
- Microsoft Excel training 302: forecasts and budgets with what-if scenarios, Solver, and auditing.
- Microsoft Excel training 401: a dashboard that refreshes with one click, built on Power Query.
What to have ready before you email
You do not need a training plan. Five lines cover it.
- How many people, and whether they all sit in one building.
- What they do in Excel now, in plain words: "tracks invoices in a list" beats "intermediate".
- What you want them able to do afterward, as a task rather than a topic.
- The one workbook that causes the most grief, so we can open it on the day.
- The weeks that are off limits: month-end, budget season, an audit.
Common questions
Can one day cover two skill levels? Yes, by splitting the room by level, one group in the morning and one in the afternoon, or by running two half-days across a week. Mixing the levels in one session is the thing to avoid.
Our team is spread across offices. Is onsite still the right call? Not if they will never be in one room. For that case I deliver the same material live over video, still on your files, or point a single learner at a library for a single skill.
What does a learner do differently the next morning? After 101, they lock a cell reference with a dollar sign so a copied formula stops drifting, the relative-versus-absolute distinction on Microsoft's help page. After 301, they group a PivotTable by month or quarter instead of retyping a summary. After 401, they refresh a Power Query connection instead of pasting in last month's export.
Related guides
- Onsite training or a webinar: which fits your team: the same comparison across Word, Outlook and PowerPoint.
- Planning a software-skills PD day: shaping a whole day when Excel is one block of it.
- Office training for a municipality or public agency: quotes, procurement and dates for public-sector buyers.
Checked against Microsoft support pages on September 21, 2026: Convert numbers stored as text to numbers in Excel, Switch between relative, absolute, and mixed references, Group or ungroup data in a PivotTable, About Power Query in Excel
