Excel Practice Sheets

Excel for HR

HR data is small, sensitive and full of dates — which makes date arithmetic and careful conditional logic the core skills.

Start Human Resources Practice11 exercises, free, no account needed

What the job actually asks for

Headcount by department, tenure, time-to-hire, turnover rate, salary banding. The datasets rarely run to thousands of rows, but the calculations feed decisions about real people, so being approximately right is not acceptable.

The recurring tasks

  • Calculate tenure and time-to-hire
  • Summarise headcount by department
  • Band salaries and check pay equity
  • Track turnover rates by quarter

Where people get caught

Averages that mislead. Mean salary in a small team is dragged badly by one senior figure, and reporting it without the median produces a number that is technically correct and practically wrong.

What interviews test

Calculating tenure from a hire date, counting headcount with several conditions, and knowing when a median tells the truer story than a mean.

Practice built from human resources work

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

Beginner

6 exercises · 1 step

One function, one step, a small and tidy dataset.

Advanced

1 exercise · 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 human resources — they are the keystrokes and the misconceptions that catch everyone out, whatever the spreadsheet is about.