Excel exercises
Excel exercises with instant answers
86 spreadsheet tasks, sorted by the skill each one teaches. Type a formula, find out what is wrong, and move on. There is nothing to install, and you do not need an account to start.
Pick the skill you need
Each group is a run of exercises that build on each other. Start at the top of a group, or jump to the exercise you came for.
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Getting started
This group has one exercise about moving around a sheet without the mouse.
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Adding things up
This group covers addition in a spreadsheet: one column, several blocks, and totals that include only the rows meeting a condition.
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Counting rows
Counting gets harder as soon as the column has gaps, text that looks like a number, or a condition attached.
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Averages and ranks
This group is about choosing which summary a column of numbers deserves.
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Decisions with IF
IF turns a comparison into a decision, and this group builds the functions around it.
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Rounding money
Rounding to two decimals on screen and rounding the stored number are different operations, and money cares about the difference.
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Looking values up
Looking a value up is routine work, and most of what goes wrong sits in the arguments people leave out.
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INDEX and MATCH
INDEX and MATCH are two ordinary functions that combine into a lookup you can point in any direction.
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Finding text
A lot of the text in a spreadsheet has to be measured or cut before it can be used.
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Tidying text
Imported text arrives with its own casing, spacing and punctuation, and this group is the clean-up pass.
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Errors and blanks
An error value is still a value, and this group is about reading one before deciding to hide it.
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Dates and deadlines
A date in Excel is a number with a format on it, and every date problem is a problem with that number.
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SUMPRODUCT and friends
Some totals need two columns multiplied before they are added, and some need to ignore rows a filter has hidden.
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Dynamic arrays
A current version of Excel lets one formula return a block of cells, and this group uses that for three jobs.
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Real workbooks
This group is four small workbooks where the formulas have to agree with each other.
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Capstone projects
The capstones give you a business question and a workbook, with less scaffolding than the exercises before them.
How an exercise works
- Type the formula. Each task names a cell and gives you the numbers already in the sheet.
- Get told what is wrong. The checker reads the function, the cell references and the result, so a right number from the wrong range still fails.
- Read the reason. A rejected answer names the rule it broke, so you know what to change.
Start with SUM: total a column
Questions before you start
Are the exercises free?
10 of the 86 are free, with the grading and the notes. The free ones are spread through the whole track, not taken from the front, and the start page puts them in the order to take them.
10 exercises are free forever, with no account and no card, and every payment carries a 100% refund guarantee inside 30 days. The other 76 come with the track, one price for all of them: $9.99 a month, $39.99 every six months or $59.99 a year.
Every plan renews for another term of the same length unless you cancel: a month, six months or a year, whichever you bought. Cancel from your account page in one click, and the time you already paid for runs to its end. The price does not change for the term you are in.
Do I need Excel installed?
No. The sheet is on the page and the checking runs in your browser. The notes cover Excel and Google Sheets, and they say where the two differ. A workbook exercise gives you a file to open in Excel, Sheets or LibreOffice.
How is an answer checked?
The formula is what gets checked. A right total from the wrong function or the wrong range is rejected, and the reason you get names the rule it broke. The about page explains how the checker works.