I don’t offer a standard Intermediate Excel course (or indeed, a standard Beginners course or a standard Advanced course).
There are a couple of reasons for this.
Firstly, I tailor all Excel training that I deliver to the needs of the course participants.
To do this, I speak to the team or manager before hand, and use my own questionnaire with the team to understand their experience, usage and knowledge. I bring my own knowledge of what I think the team would find useful, and propose a course outline ahead of designing the training materials.
Secondly, there is a lot of scope for debate about what counts as “intermediate” or “advanced” Excel.
For example, lots of people haven’t heard about Power Query, or assume it’s an advanced function. In my view, it’s an easier way to achieve the same results as some more complex formulas, and therefore has a lot to offer even inexperienced Excel users. I will often try to include it no matter what level I’m training.
On a related note, when I review course outlines for intermediate Excel courses I see a lot of stuff on there which I just don’t think is that relevant these days. I’m not sure why you’d spend a lot of time on VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP when XLOOKUP does both a lot better.
(Well, OK, here are a couple of reasons, but these may not be relevant for your team, so why should you have to sit through me explaining how to use VLOOKUP safely when you may never need to do this actively?)
The fact is, Excel is changing so fast that standard courses become out of date very quickly.
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