Excel Practice Sheets

Excel for students

Excel is the skill most often screened for before an interview and most often overstated on a résumé. Closing that gap is worth more than another line on the CV.

What the job actually asks for

The functions that appear in graduate assessments are a small, stable set: lookups, conditional aggregation, logical tests and text cleaning. Depth in those beats passing familiarity with fifty functions.

The recurring tasks

  • Learn the functions interviews actually test
  • Practise under time pressure
  • Build a portfolio-worthy analysis
  • Understand why a formula works, not just that it does

Where people get caught

Learning by watching. Reading about XLOOKUP produces recognition, not recall — and an assessment asks for recall, on data you have not seen, with someone watching.

What interviews test

Writing lookups and conditional sums from memory, at speed, and explaining the reasoning while you do it.

Practice built from student work

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

Other roles