Excel practice exercises

How the exercises work

Each exercise is a small sheet with real data and one task, such as totaling the orders over 100 or looking up a price. You type the formula into the cell yourself, exactly as you would in Excel, and it's checked the moment you press Enter. The grid behaves like Excel too: F2 edits a cell, Tab and Enter move you on, F4 adds the $ signs and Ctrl+D fills down.

A formula only passes if it really works. We check the answer, which function you used, which cells it reads, and that it still gives the right result when the numbers change. Typing the answer as a number, or pointing at the wrong column, won't pass. When something is off you get a hint about that exact mistake, such as a missing quote around a condition, and after a couple of tries you can see the solution.

Where to start

If you've never used a spreadsheet, start with Getting started. It shows you what cells, rows and columns are, how to select and edit, and how to write and copy your first formula, one small step at a time. Then work through The basics: SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, MIN and MAX, and rounding.

After that the topics build on each other. Logic covers IF, AND and OR. Conditional sums and counts covers SUMIF, COUNTIF and their multi-condition versions, which come up in nearly every office job and Excel test. Lookups covers VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH, XLOOKUP and IFERROR. The keyboard shortcut lessons fit in anywhere and make everything else faster.

After the core topics

Once lookups feel easy, the Text and Dates topics cover the everyday clean-up work: trimming stray spaces, splitting names, pulling a code out of a longer string, counting workdays and adding months to a date. If you use Google Sheets, the Google Sheets section covers what only Sheets can do, such as QUERY, ARRAYFORMULA and the REGEX functions.

How to get the most out of it

Short sessions work best. Ten or fifteen minutes a day, a lesson or two at a time, beats one long session a week, because the formulas have time to settle in between. Before you open a hint, try to say in one sentence what the formula should do, and after a lesson, try the same function on a sheet of your own.

If a lesson feels too easy, move on to the next topic. If it feels too hard, go back one. Most mistakes in lookups and conditional sums come from shaky ranges and references, and the basics cover those.

Excel or Google Sheets?

The lessons work for both. The grid follows Excel's keys and formula rules, and almost everything you learn carries straight over to Google Sheets.

What's free

Getting started, the keyboard shortcuts and the whole of SUM, AVERAGE and COUNT are free, and so is the first lesson in every other topic. You don't need an account to practice. Premium unlocks every lesson, the full timed job tests and certificates.

Your progress and certificates

Your progress is saved in your browser as you go. Create a free account and it follows you to any device, you earn points for each lesson and you build a streak of days in a row. Finish every lesson in a topic and you can claim a certificate with its own link that anyone can check, ready for your résumé or LinkedIn profile.