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Abstract: Mastering Microsoft Excel is an essential skill for any business school student, whether during their studies, their internships, or their future jobs. This competency is difficult to teach as many students think they master the software when they only use a tiny part of it. In this paper, we will describe an innovative course we've created to train a large group of students in our business school. This course combines e-learning paths, online synchronous sessions, and an adapted support. Having taught this course for several years, we will first describe the first sessions of the course. After these sessions, we observed that as some students are aware of the necessity to develop their skills, some others are not involved at all in the process. Following these sessions, we introduced some evolutions we will present. These evolutions improved the course. We will describe these evolutions and present the results on students' training. Finally, we will present the future developments we plan to implement for next year.

Keywords: Hybrid, Innovative course, Excel teaching

1. Introduction

Microsoft Excel is a tool used widely in companies. Whether in scientific disciplines or in management, this software is a standard in most professional activities. With this tool, the user can organize data, make calculations, have a graphic representation of data, and have some statistical analysis. In the management field, Excel is widely used in accounting, finance, operations management, logistic or marketing for example. Whatever path a student chooses, this skill will be a strong asset for their future (Bell, 2000).

Paradoxically, most students are not formally "trained to use or design spreadsheets" (Madahar, 2011). A survey was made by this author, showing that 77% of Tuck Business School Alumni consider they have a large experience in Excel but they lack expertise. This might lead to critical errors in the decision-making process (Frownfelter-Lohrke, 2017).

In this article, we will describe a course we developed for master's students in a business school. The particularity of this course is the large cohort of students concerned. In a first part, we will describe the course as it was first developed. We will analyse the results and feedback of this first year. We will then explain how the course evolved in the following years....

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