Excel skills every student
and graduate needs

What employers actually test

Most graduate job applications include an Excel test. The questions that trip people up aren't the advanced ones — they're the basics done confidently. Employers want to see you can write formulas without Googling, understand cell references, and build a simple analysis from raw data.

The formulas every graduate must know

Tier 1 — Non-negotiable

• SUM, AVERAGE, MAX, MIN, COUNT — know these without thinking
• IF — apply logic to data
• VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP — look up values between tables
• SUMIF and COUNTIF — conditional aggregation

Tier 2 — Stands out in interviews

• Pivot tables — summarise data without formulas
• INDEX MATCH — shows you understand lookups deeply
• Conditional formatting — data visualisation without charts
• IFERROR — handle errors gracefully

How to actually learn Excel (not just watch tutorials)

Watching Excel tutorials doesn't build the muscle memory you need under pressure in a test. You need to type formulas yourself, make mistakes, and fix them. Practice on real-ish data — a fake sales dataset, a budget template, anything with numbers that need analysis.

Excel vs Google Sheets for students

Most employers use Excel, not Google Sheets. The formulas are 90% identical, so learning one transfers to the other. But if you're choosing what to practice in, practice in Excel.