BeginnerDate & Time
Assemble a delivery date with DATE
Turn separate year, month and day columns into a real date Excel understands.
DATE
5 min15 points
Free · Interactive · No signup neededLearn Excel by
Learn Excel by
actually using it.
A simple place to practise Excel, built for beginners. Write real formulas in your browser and find out exactly why an answer is wrong — not just that it is.
No account, no download. The grid below is live — try it now.
Try it now — no account needed
Click D2 and write a formula for achievement against target.
A1
fx
| Row number | A | B | C | D |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rep | Sales | Target | Achievement |
| 2 | Marcus Bell | $95,000 | $100,000 | |
| 3 | Dana Whitfield | $120,000 | $100,000 | |
| 4 | Alan Reyes | $80,000 | $100,000 |
Hint: divide sales by target.
Start here
84 exercises, in the order to do them
Numbered so you never have to wonder what comes next. Each one takes a few minutes.
- BeginnerText Functions
Build a product code with CONCAT
Join a category prefix and an item number into a single SKU.
CONCAT
4 min10 points - BeginnerMath Functions
Calculate a funnel conversion rate
Work out what share of one funnel stage reached the next.
5 min15 points - BeginnerMath Functions
Calculate click-through rate
Express clicks as a percentage of the impressions that earned them.
4 min10 points - BeginnerFormulas
Calculate line totals with multiplication
Multiply quantity by unit price to get a line total.
3 min10 points - BeginnerMath Functions
Calculate the annual turnover rate
Divide leavers by average headcount to get a turnover percentage.
4 min10 points - BeginnerText Functions
Check code length with LEN
Use LEN to validate that product codes are the right length.
LEN
3 min10 points - BeginnerExcel Basics
Convert loose units into full cases
Divide a unit count by the case size to see how many cases were ordered.
3 min10 points
| # | Exercise | Functions | Difficulty | Time | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Assemble a delivery date with DATEHarbor Supply — inbound delivery schedule | DATE | Beginner | 5 min | 15 pts |
| 2 | Build a product code with CONCATHarbor Supply — new catalogue load | CONCAT | Beginner | 4 min | 10 pts |
| 3 | Calculate a funnel conversion rateHarbor Supply — distributor sign-up funnel | — | Beginner | 5 min | 15 pts |
| 4 | Calculate click-through rateHarbor Supply — campaign performance export | — | Beginner | 4 min | 10 pts |
| 5 | Calculate line totals with multiplicationHarbor Supply — order ORD-1046 lines | — | Beginner | 3 min | 10 pts |
| 6 | Calculate the annual turnover rateHarbor Supply — annual turnover summary | — | Beginner | 4 min | 10 pts |
| 7 | Check code length with LENHarbor Supply — product code import | LEN | Beginner | 3 min | 10 pts |
| 8 | Convert loose units into full casesHarbor Supply — pick list, units to cases | — | Beginner | 3 min | 10 pts |
Ways to practise
Three kinds of exercise, not one
The spreadsheet is most of it, but knowing Excel is also knowing the keys and knowing what breaks.
- 72 exercises
Spreadsheet exercises
Write real formulas against realistic business data and find out which assumption broke when they are wrong.
A working grid, not multiple choice - 6 exercises
Shortcut drills
Answer by pressing the shortcut rather than naming it. The muscle memory is the skill, so typing it out would prove nothing.
Press the keys, not the answer - 6 exercises
Quick questions
The things people get wrong about Excel rather than the things they cannot type — what #N/A means, when VLOOKUP genuinely cannot help.
Two minutes each, no grid
What you'll be able to do
From typing numbers in to working them out
Not a syllabus — the specific things you can do afterwards, and the exercise that teaches each one.
By hand
- 1. Filter to North. Filter to March.
- 2. Select the column, read the total off the status bar.
- 3. Type 34,765 into the report.
- 4. Next month, do all of it again.
Someone adds a row afterwards and the report is quietly wrong. Nothing warns you.
With a formula
=SUMIFS(Amount, Region, "North", Month, "March")
- Recalculates the moment the data changes.
- Swap "North" for another region and you have the next answer.
- Anyone reading it can see how the number was reached.
Written once. Correct every month after that.
After 10
Your first hour
Enough to stop retyping numbers a spreadsheet can work out for you.
After 35
After thirty-five
The point where a spreadsheet starts answering questions rather than storing numbers.
After 84
By the end
The things people actually get asked to do, including the ones that go wrong.
84 exercises · 30 functions · about 9.5 hours end to end · free · no account needed to start.
How it works
Three steps, then repeat
- 1
Pick an exercise
Start at number one. Each is a small, real situation — a sales sheet, an invoice list, a messy export.
- 2
Write the formula
Type it into a real spreadsheet, exactly as you would in Excel — or press the keys, on a shortcut drill.
- 3
Find out why
Wrong answers get explained, not just marked. You learn which assumption broke, then try again.
Keep going
Ten minutes a day beats a weekend course
Excel sticks through repetition, not through watching. So the site is built to make coming back easy.
A streak worth keeping
Practise on consecutive days and it counts. Miss one and it resets — which is exactly why it works.
Points that mean something
More for solving first time, more for doing it without hints. Effort is what scores.
A map of what is weak
Your dashboard scores each skill on accuracy and how recently you practised, so you always know where to go next.
All of it is free, and you can practise without an account — signing up is only what saves your progress.
Questions
Frequently asked
Do I need Excel installed to use this?
No. Everything runs in your browser. You write real formulas against real datasets without opening Excel, Google Sheets or anything else.
Is it free?
The core practice library will be free, including a daily challenge. A paid tier is planned later for advanced projects, interview simulation and certificates, but the fundamentals stay free.
How is this different from watching Excel tutorials?
You do the work. A video shows you someone else typing a formula; here you type it yourself, get it wrong, and find out precisely which part of your thinking was off. That gap is where the learning happens.
What happens when my answer is wrong?
You get told what specifically went wrong — a range that isn't locked, a lookup pointing at the wrong column, a single-condition function on a two-condition problem — rather than just 'incorrect'. The solution stays hidden unless you ask for it.
Which Excel functions are covered?
The library starts with the thirty functions that appear most in real work and in interviews: SUM, AVERAGE, COUNTIF, COUNTIFS, SUMIF, SUMIFS, IF, IFS, AND, OR, VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH, LEFT, RIGHT, MID, LEN, FIND, SEARCH, CONCAT, TEXTJOIN, TODAY, DATE, MIN, MAX, LARGE, SMALL and MEDIAN.
Will this help me pass an Excel interview?
That's what it's built for. Exercises use the situations interviews actually test — lookups across tables, conditional aggregation, cleaning a messy export — and a timed interview simulator is on the roadmap.
Does it work on a phone?
You can browse exercises, read explanations and track progress on a phone. Writing formulas in a spreadsheet grid genuinely needs a keyboard, so complex exercises are best on a laptop or desktop.
Why practising Excel beats studying it
Excel is the most widely used analytical tool in American offices, and it is consistently the skill employers screen for before an interview ever happens. It is also the skill people most often overstate on a résumé — because reading about a function feels a lot like knowing it.
The gap shows up the moment someone is asked to do the work. A candidate who has watched a lookup tutorial can describe what XLOOKUP does. A candidate who has written forty of them knows what happens when the lookup array and the return array are different sizes, why an unlocked range breaks the moment you fill it down, and which of the two obvious approaches survives a column being inserted.
That second kind of knowledge only comes from doing the thing and getting it wrong in a place where being wrong is free. This site exists to be that place: realistic datasets, real formula entry, and feedback that tells you which assumption failed rather than simply marking the answer red.
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You have ten minutes. Take an Excel problem.
Solve it, learn something, and get handed the next one.
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