I teach a lot of live Excel training, especially online. Over time, certain patterns become impossible to ignore.
Some people leave a session with ideas they immediately apply. Others leave with notes, recordings, and good intentions that never quite turn into usable skill. The difference is rarely intelligence, motivation, or even experience level. It almost always comes down to how people show up to the session itself.
This post is about what actually makes live Excel training work, particularly in an online format, and what responsibilities quietly sit with the learner whether or not they are explicitly stated.
Live Excel training is not content consumption
Live Excel training is often treated like content. Something to watch, skim, or half-follow while doing something else. That framing is understandable, especially when so much professional learning now looks like videos, courses, and recorded demos.
But Excel skills are procedural and judgment-based. They develop through hands-on work: trying things, noticing what breaks, correcting mistakes, and revising your thinking. Watching someone else use Excel can build familiarity, but familiarity is not the same as competence. You don’t learn when to reach for a PivotTable, Power Query, or Copilot by seeing it once. You learn by using it yourself and discovering where your assumptions fail.
That is why live Excel training functions much more like a workshop than a lecture. The value comes from participation, not exposure.
Setup is part of the work, not an inconvenience
When a live session focuses on a specific Excel capability—Copilot in Excel, Power Query, Power Pivot, Python in Excel—there is an assumption that you have at least opened the tool before the session starts.
You do not need to know how to use it well. You do not need to understand what it is doing under the hood. What matters is basic orientation: whether the feature exists in your environment, where it lives in your version of Excel, and what you see when you try to open it.
This matters because Excel is not one thing. Desktop and web behave differently. Windows and Mac differ. Features are tied to licenses, update channels, and tenant settings. In a live session, especially online, an instructor cannot see your setup and cannot easily tell whether you are blocked by access or by understanding.
If a session does not explicitly say that setup and access will be handled together, then setup is assumed. Live time works best when it is spent on how to use a feature and why it matters, rather than on figuring out whether the feature is available at all.
Practical prep you can do ahead of a session
You do not have to do everything here. Even a little preparation helps.
- Check your Excel version: Open Excel and go to File > Account. Note whether you are on Excel Desktop or Excel for the web, and what subscription or update channel is listed.
- Look up where the feature exists: Check whether the capability is available on desktop, web, Windows-only, or subject to tenant controls.
- Open the tool once: Try opening Power Query, Power Pivot, Copilot, or Python in Excel so you know what happens when you click it.
- Notice what you see: Is the button missing, disabled, or throwing an access message?
- Bring specifics with you: “I’m on Excel Desktop for Windows and Power Pivot isn’t showing up” gives an instructor something concrete to work with.
Preparation here is simply about keeping live time focused on learning, rather than burning it on environment and access issues that could have been surfaced earlier.
Trying and failing is not optional
Most of the learning in live Excel training happens when something does not work.
You try an exercise, the result looks wrong, and you are forced to reconcile what you expected Excel to do with what it actually did. That mismatch is where understanding forms. If you only watch, you skip that step. You may follow the instructor’s logic, but you never test your own, which often leads to confidence without competence and trouble the moment you are on your own.
Live Excel training is designed around this kind of friction.
Productive failure still needs a safety net. Sessions should feel safe to experiment in, but learners also need to bring some of that safety with them. That is why practice files and solution files matter. They let you recover if you fall behind, check your thinking, and rejoin the session without stalling.
If materials are provided, use them. Open the practice file. Keep the solution file handy. Comparing your work to a working example is usually faster and more instructive than waiting for answers in chat.
Questions need structure to be answerable
In online training, instructors cannot see your screen. They do not know your data, workbook layout, Excel version, or the steps you took unless you share them. That is why a vague “that didn’t work” dropped into chat rarely leads to a useful answer.
Questions that actually move things forward usually include three things: what you tried, what you expected to happen, and what happened instead. That level of detail is enough to give an instructor something to reason about.
If you want a deeper breakdown of how to ask a good Excel question, check out this post. It walks through examples and patterns in more detail than a live session ever can.
That said, asking good questions in real time is hard. Live online training moves quickly, and it is not always realistic to craft a perfectly formed question on the spot. This is a skill that improves with practice, especially in slower, time-independent environments like working through exercises, reviewing solution files, or posting questions asynchronously. The more you practice articulating your thinking there, the easier it becomes to do it live.
Chat questions also may not be answered immediately. That delay is not dismissal. Instructors are balancing demonstrations, pacing, and dozens of learners at once, and well-structured questions still matter even if the response comes later.
Materials are part of the learning design
Starter files, demo notes, and solution workbooks are part of the course design, not extras.
They exist to help you orient yourself, catch up, and understand what a working result looks like. Checking a solution file often teaches you more than collecting answers one at a time.
The goal of live training is not to memorize what the instructor typed. It is to develop a sense of what “normal” looks like in an Excel workflow, so you can recognize when things are going right or wrong.
Online feedback is your responsibility
In a physical room, instructors can read faces, body language, and energy. Online, they cannot.
If you finish an exercise, say so. If you are stuck, say so. If you are completely lost, say so. These signals matter more than people realize. Without them, pacing becomes guesswork, and guesswork usually underserves everyone.
In an online environment, learners are the instructor’s eyes and ears. If you want the session to adapt to where people actually are, that information has to come from somewhere.
Recordings are a safety net, not the experience
Recordings are useful. They are essential when someone arrives late, leaves early, or needs to revisit a specific concept. But they are not a substitute for participation.
Most people do not rewatch full sessions. Even fewer pause recordings to redo exercises carefully. And when they do, the experience is rarely as effective as being live, where decisions have to be made in real time.
Excel skills stick when you struggle a bit in the moment, ask questions, and resolve confusion while the context is still fresh. If that happens, the recording becomes reference material rather than a promise you make to yourself and never keep.
A practical checklist for live Excel training
Here’s a checklist you can actually use in live Excel training to get more out of it, at any skill level:
Conclusion & next steps
Live Excel training works when it is treated as practice, not content consumption. When expectations are clear and learners are encouraged to engage, try things, and give feedback, live sessions reliably translate into real capability. When those conditions are missing, even strong content struggles to land.
The checklist above is meant to be used, not admired. Share it with participants before a session. Use it to set expectations. Refer back to it afterward when deciding what actually stuck. Small shifts in how people show up tend to produce outsized changes in outcomes.
If you are responsible for training analysts or Excel users inside an organization and want live training that leads to changed behavior rather than temporary familiarity, this structure matters. I work with teams to design and deliver Excel training that emphasizes judgment, participation, and real workflow application, not passive feature walkthroughs. That includes shaping the session format itself, not just the material inside it.
If this is the kind of training experience you are trying to build, you can get in touch here to discuss training or advisory options: