Excel Practice Sheets

Excel for consultants

Consultants build models fast, on someone else's messy data, and then have to defend the numbers in front of the client.

Start Consulting Practice15 exercises, free, no account needed

What the job actually asks for

The data arrives in whatever shape the client's system produced. The work is structuring it quickly, building a model with visible drivers, and sanity-checking output before it reaches a slide — because a wrong number in front of a client is expensive.

The recurring tasks

  • Clean and structure a client's export
  • Build scenario models with clear drivers
  • Produce summary tables for a deck
  • Sanity-check figures before they reach a client

Where people get caught

Burying assumptions inside formulas. A growth rate typed into the middle of a calculation cannot be changed in a meeting, which is exactly when someone asks what happens at eight percent instead of five.

What interviews test

Structuring a messy export quickly, building a model with clearly separated inputs, and explaining how you check your own work.

Practice built from consultant work

15 exercises using the situations above. Work down the levels — each one assumes the one before it.

Intermediate

7 exercises · 2–3 steps

Two or three functions combined, or one function with conditions.

Advanced

6 exercises · 3–5 steps

Nested logic across a realistic dataset, with edge cases that bite.

Prefer to work in real Excel? Download the practice files — the same datasets with the answer cells left blank. You lose the feedback, which is the part that does the teaching.

Other roles

Skills every role needs

These are not specific to consultant — they are the keystrokes and the misconceptions that catch everyone out, whatever the spreadsheet is about.