Excel Practice Sheets

Excel for data analysts

The job description says analysis. The calendar says cleaning, joining and reshaping, and Excel is where most of that still happens.

What the job actually asks for

Analysts spend far more time preparing data than analysing it: splitting text, standardising labels, joining on shared keys, and checking that the join actually matched what it should have. The analysis itself is often the shortest part of the work.

The recurring tasks

  • Clean exports before analysis
  • Join datasets on a shared key
  • Build pivot summaries by dimension
  • Identify outliers and explain them

Where people get caught

Trusting a join without checking it. A lookup that silently returns #N/A for eight percent of rows produces a total that is wrong by eight percent, and nothing on screen says so.

What interviews test

Lookups in both directions, conditional aggregation with several criteria, splitting messy text, and — the part candidates fumble — explaining why you chose one approach over another.

Practice built from data analyst work

9 exercises using the situations above, ordered from most approachable to hardest.

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