Upskilling in Excel
The Situation
Staff across Harvard’s Advancement office were frustrated — and vocal about it. The technology group delivered regular reports packed with data, and the complaints were consistent: too much information, too hard to work with, too time-consuming to get what they actually needed. The assumption driving those complaints was that the reports were the problem.
The reports weren’t the problem.
Listening carefully to what staff were actually struggling with revealed something different. People didn’t know how to remove and reformat data efficiently. They didn’t know how to pull in the few missing data points they needed from a second report without manually cross-referencing thousands of rows. They didn’t know how to summarize detailed data in a way that made it readable and useful. The reports contained everything they needed. Staff simply didn’t have the tools to work with them.
The solution wasn’t a better report. It was better skills.
The Design Insight
The gap wasn’t knowledge of Excel in the abstract — it was knowledge of the specific Excel features that would solve the specific problems staff were experiencing every day. A general “Excel training” would have missed the mark entirely. What was needed was a direct line from each identified frustration to the feature that resolved it.
That mapping shaped everything: the course topics, the sequencing, the examples used in class, and the way each course was framed. Every session started not with “here’s what this feature does” but with “here’s the problem you’ve been having — and here’s how this solves it.”
The Approach
Six instructor-led courses were developed, each 60 minutes, organized in pairs around the three core problems staff were experiencing:
Staff Issue and Solution Courses Offered
Time-intensive to remove unneeded data from report and re-format report
Macros Basics
Macros Advanced
Resulted in staff able to automate repetitive formatting tasks that were consuming hours of their week.
Reports had nearly all the data they wanted except for a few key data points that were on other reports.
VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP Basics
VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP Advanced
Gave staff the ability to pull exactly the data they needed from any report, without manual cross-referencing.
Detailed reports with data in thousands of rows and many, many columns were hard to summarize.
PivotTable Basics
PivotTable Advanced
Staff could easily and quickly transform unwieldy data into clear, flexible summaries that actually supported decision-making.
Each course was designed as a complete learning experience, not just a live session.
Delivery Method: Instructor-led; 60 minutes
Materials: one-page job aid to reference after class
Online Resources: intranet webpage for each course with
brief video review of use for the specific Excel feature,
one to two additional exercises to try with sample data used in class and solutions so learners could check their work,
links to external YouTube videos with easy-to-understand explanations of that Excel feature.
The intranet resources were a deliberate design choice. Sixty minutes is enough to learn a skill. It isn’t always enough to make it stick — especially when weeks pass before someone has the chance to apply it. The online resources gave learners a place to return when the moment finally arrived.
The Outcome
The impact was immediate and lasting. Staff who took the courses stopped struggling with the reports that had frustrated them for years — and started talking about them. Word spread. Year after year, staff who had gone through the training recommended it to incoming colleagues, describing it as something that had genuinely transformed how they worked.
The complaints about reports stopped. The confidence didn’t.
The Situation
Staff across Harvard’s Advancement office were frustrated — and vocal about it. The technology group delivered regular reports packed with data, and the complaints were consistent: too much information, too hard to work with, too time-consuming to get what they actually needed. The assumption driving those complaints was that the reports were the problem.
The reports weren’t the problem.
Listening carefully to what staff were actually struggling with revealed something different. People didn’t know how to remove and reformat data efficiently. They didn’t know how to pull in the few missing data points they needed from a second report without manually cross-referencing thousands of rows. They didn’t know how to summarize detailed data in a way that made it readable and useful. The reports contained everything they needed. Staff simply didn’t have the tools to work with them.
The solution wasn’t a better report. It was better skills.
The Design Insight
The gap wasn’t knowledge of Excel in the abstract — it was knowledge of the specific Excel features that would solve the specific problems staff were experiencing every day. A general “Excel training” would have missed the mark entirely. What was needed was a direct line from each identified frustration to the feature that resolved it.
That mapping shaped everything: the course topics, the sequencing, the examples used in class, and the way each course was framed. Every session started not with “here’s what this feature does” but with “here’s the problem you’ve been having — and here’s how this solves it.”
The Approach
Six instructor-led courses were developed, each 60 minutes, organized in pairs around the three core problems staff were experiencing:
Staff Issue and Solution Courses Offered
Time-intensive to remove unneeded data from report and re-format report
Macros Basics
Macros Advanced
Resulted in staff able to automate repetitive formatting tasks that were consuming hours of their week.
Reports had nearly all the data they wanted except for a few key data points that were on other reports.
VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP Basics
VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP Advanced
Gave staff the ability to pull exactly the data they needed from any report, without manual cross-referencing.
Detailed reports with data in thousands of rows and many, many columns were hard to summarize.
PivotTable Basics
PivotTable Advanced
Staff could easily and quickly transform unwieldy data into clear, flexible summaries that actually supported decision-making.
Each course was designed as a complete learning experience, not just a live session.
Delivery Method: Instructor-led; 60 minutes
Materials: one-page job aid to reference after class
Online Resources: intranet webpage for each course with
brief video review of use for the specific Excel feature,
one to two additional exercises to try with sample data used in class and solutions so learners could check their work,
links to external YouTube videos with easy-to-understand explanations of that Excel feature.
The intranet resources were a deliberate design choice. Sixty minutes is enough to learn a skill. It isn’t always enough to make it stick — especially when weeks pass before someone has the chance to apply it. The online resources gave learners a place to return when the moment finally arrived.
The Outcome
The impact was immediate and lasting. Staff who took the courses stopped struggling with the reports that had frustrated them for years — and started talking about them. Word spread. Year after year, staff who had gone through the training recommended it to incoming colleagues, describing it as something that had genuinely transformed how they worked.
The complaints about reports stopped. The confidence didn’t.