Excel practice test: what the assessment asks, and how to pass it

Finance, accounting, analyst, admin and operations roles increasingly come with an Excel assessment before the offer. The good news: the questions are predictable. This page lists what gets asked, what the common formats look like, and a free set of practice exercises that check your answers the way a test would.

What an Excel skills test usually covers

Employers and testing platforms (Indeed assessments, TestGorilla, Kenexa Prove It, iMocha and in-house tests) draw from the same short list of skills. Expect questions on most of these:

Basic formulas and references: SUM, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX, COUNT, percent change, and locking a cell with dollar signs so a formula can be copied.
Conditional math: SUMIF and SUMIFS, COUNTIF and COUNTIFS, AVERAGEIF, usually with two criteria at once.
Logic: IF, nested IF or IFS, AND and OR inside a condition, IFERROR around a calculation that can fail.
Lookups: VLOOKUP exact and approximate match, XLOOKUP with a not-found value, INDEX and MATCH when the answer is to the left.
Text and dates: cleaning names with TRIM and PROPER, joining text, extracting part of a cell, days between dates, end of month.
Simple finance: a loan payment with PMT, total interest, growth rates, break-even.
Spotting the mistake: a finished sheet where one formula is wrong, such as a range that stops a row short or a rate typed into a formula.
Formatting and navigation: number formats, filters, sorting, freezing panes, and the keyboard shortcuts that show you are comfortable in the tool.

The three formats you will meet

Multiple choice about Excel knowledge: which function returns the position of a value, what #N/A means. Quick to prepare for; read a function list the night before.
Live tasks in a workbook, often timed: fill the yellow cells, build the summary, fix the error. This is where most people lose marks, because knowing a function and writing it under a clock are different skills.
A take-home case: a messy export and a list of questions from a manager. Here accuracy matters more than speed, and the ability to clean numbers stored as text or stray spaces is tested as much as the formulas.

A free Excel practice test: eight exercises checked instantly

These eight exercises are free without an account and cover the ground most assessments do. Each one runs on a small spreadsheet in your browser. You type the formula, it is checked on the data you see and again on changed numbers, so a typed-in answer fails the way it would in a real review.

Switch on timed mode to practice under a clock. Hints and solutions stay locked until the time is up, which is the closest thing to the real test.

The Excel interview test questions people fail most

Across the 68 exercises on Formuladrill, the same mistakes repeat. If you fix these five before the test, you are ahead of most candidates.

Forgetting to lock a reference. A tax rate in G1 referenced as G1 instead of $G$1 gives the right answer in the first row and garbage when copied down.
Using VLOOKUP when the answer is to the left of the lookup column. VLOOKUP cannot look left; INDEX and MATCH or XLOOKUP can.
Approximate match by accident. VLOOKUP's last argument defaults to approximate match, which returns a wrong but plausible value when the exact code is missing.
Criteria typed into the formula. SUMIFS(B:B, A:A, "North") works until the manager asks for the South; referencing a cell makes one formula serve every region.
Numbers stored as text. A column that looks numeric but sums to zero is the most common trap in take-home cases. VALUE, or multiplying by 1, fixes it.

How to prepare in a week

Days 1 and 2: Basics and Logic and counting. Make SUMIFS, COUNTIFS and IF automatic, including two criteria and a cell reference as the criterion.
Days 3 and 4: Lookups. VLOOKUP exact and approximate, XLOOKUP with the not-found argument, INDEX and MATCH to the left and in a grid.
Day 5: Text and dates. TRIM, PROPER, TEXTJOIN, SUBSTITUTE, days between dates, EDATE and EOMONTH.
Day 6: Work mode and Find the error. Messy data and planted mistakes, which is what a take-home case or a senior-level test looks like.
Day 7: Timed mode across every level you have done. Repeat the ones you failed until they pass first time.

If you also want to look fluent while the interviewer watches, our sister site Shortcutdrill drills the keyboard shortcuts on a live sheet with a limit on key presses.

Start the practice test

Eight exercises free, no sign-up. Pro unlocks all 68, with worked solutions and progress saved to your account, for $12 a month or $79 once.

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Questions

How long is a typical Excel assessment?

Most pre-employment Excel tests take 20 to 45 minutes and have 15 to 30 questions or tasks. Live workbook tasks usually allow two to five minutes each, which is why timed practice matters.

What score do I need to pass an Excel test?

Employers set their own bar, commonly 70 to 80 percent for roles that use Excel daily. For analyst and finance roles the lookup and conditional-sum questions carry the most weight.

Do I need Excel installed to practice here?

No. Each exercise runs on a small spreadsheet in your browser that follows Excel's rules for the functions covered. The formulas you write work unchanged in Excel, and nearly all of them in Google Sheets.

Does the practice test cover pivot tables?

Formuladrill covers formulas. Pivot tables have their own site, Pivotdrill, with 31 exercises where you build the pivot and the result is checked number by number.

Is there a free version?

The first eight exercises are free without an account, including a Work mode task and a Find the error task. Pro unlocks the other 60.