Excel test for interview: practice questions with answers

What your practice score means

Your score shows how many of these 20 Excel test questions and answers you got right, with a breakdown by section. Use it to find the area to practise: if lookups were hard, spend your time there; if formatting questions were easy, move on. Real tests use their own questions and often ask you to work in a live spreadsheet, so treat this as practice for the ideas, not a prediction of your result.

What Excel tests for jobs check

Excel tests for jobs check whether you can do everyday spreadsheet tasks accurately and reasonably quickly. Most combine a few kinds of question:

• Formulas: adding, averaging and calculating with cell references, and using IF for simple decisions.
• Formatting and data: sorting, filtering, freezing headers, removing duplicates and conditional formatting.
• Lookups: finding a value in a table with VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP or INDEX and MATCH.
• Summaries and charts: PivotTables to total data by category, and choosing a suitable chart.

Some tests are multiple choice, like the practice above; others give you a workbook and ask you to complete tasks in it. The invitation usually says which, so read it before you practise. Excel interview questions in a live interview often cover the same skills, asked as "how would you..." questions.

Basic vs intermediate Excel tests

Basic Excel tests suit roles where spreadsheets are part of the job but not the whole job, such as administration, customer support and sales support. Expect SUM, AVERAGE, simple IF formulas, sorting, filtering, basic formatting and printing or sharing a sheet.

Intermediate Excel tests suit roles where data is central, such as analysts, coordinators and finance assistants. Expect lookups, COUNTIF and SUMIF, absolute and relative references, PivotTables, charts, data validation and cleaning messy data.

Read the job advert to work out which level applies. If it mentions reports, dashboards or reconciliations, prepare for intermediate questions.

The functions that come up most

These functions and features are common in Excel tests for interview because they reflect everyday work:

• SUM, AVERAGE, MIN and MAX for quick totals and summaries, including how blank cells are handled.
• IF for decisions, such as marking an order as late or a score as a pass.
• VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP for pulling a value from another table; know that VLOOKUP needs FALSE for an exact match, that XLOOKUP matches exactly by default, and what #N/A means.
• COUNTIF and SUMIF for counting and adding values that meet a condition.
• Absolute references (with $) so formulas copy correctly.
• PivotTables for summarising large lists by category.

If you know these well, you can answer most Excel test sample questions you will meet in hiring.

Excel interview questions you may be asked out loud

Alongside an Excel test for interview, some employers ask spoken questions to see how you think. Common ones include:

• "How would you combine data from two sheets that share a customer ID?" A good answer mentions a lookup such as XLOOKUP or VLOOKUP with an exact match, and checking for #N/A results.
• "How would you find and remove duplicate entries?" Mention Remove Duplicates, or COUNTIF to flag repeats first so you can check them.
• "How would you summarise a large sales list by region and month?" A PivotTable is the usual answer, with a chart if the trend matters.
• "How do you check that your formulas are right?" Spot-check a few rows by hand, use totals that should match, and look out for blank cells and text stored as numbers.

Answer with the steps you would take, not just the function name, and mention how you would check the result. That shows the careful working style employers look for.

How to prepare in one evening

If your test is tomorrow, this plan covers the essentials of Excel test prep in about two hours:

1. Take the practice test above and note the sections where you lost marks.
2. Build a small practice sheet of 20 rows: a date, a region, a product and a sales figure.
3. Practise formulas on it: totals, averages, an IF that labels large orders, a COUNTIF and a SUMIF by region.
4. Practise a lookup: a second small table of product prices and a VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP to bring the price in.
5. Make a PivotTable of sales by region, and a line chart of sales by date.
6. Practise filtering and sorting, and freeze the header row.

That covers how to pass an Excel test at most levels: knowing the core functions well and working carefully.

For employers

If you are hiring and want to check spreadsheet skills before interviews, HireValid's Microsoft Excel basic and Microsoft Excel intermediate tests use short, timed items like the ones above, with ranked results. They appear in role bundles such as office administrator and junior data analyst. More free practice for candidates is on our practice tests page.