Free Excel tutorial
Learn Excel, one formula at a time
15 short chapters on the formulas that actually come up in an analyst interview — references, lookups, conditional aggregation, and the traps that fail candidates — grouped Basic → Intermediate → Advanced. Every example is a live grid: read a little, run it, change it, see what happens. Runs on IronCalc, a real spreadsheet engine compiled to WebAssembly — nothing to install. No prior Excel experience assumed — chapter one starts at your very first formula.
No pivot-table button — this course teaches you to build the same rollup with SUMIFS and UNIQUE, since that's what an interviewer can actually ask you to reason through.
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Basic
7 chaptersFrom your first =, no prior Excel needed: references, IF, and conditional aggregation.
- 01Start here: Excel & this tutorial4 minWhat you're actually learning, how these hands-on chapters work, and what's running under the grid.
- 02Your first formula: =, references, and SUM6 minThe one character that starts a formula, why referencing beats typing numbers in, and the function everything else in this track builds on.
- 03References and the $: relative vs absolute4 minWhy a formula that works in row 1 silently breaks in row 2 — and how $ locks it down.
- 04Nested IF and IFS: Excel's CASE WHEN5 minTurn multi-branch business logic into a formula without it collapsing into unreadable nesting.
- 05SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, AVERAGEIFS: conditional aggregation5 minExcel's GROUP BY + HAVING — sum, count or average only the rows matching every condition you give it.
- 06Text I: LEFT, RIGHT, MID, LEN, FIND, SEARCH5 minPulling substrings out of messy text — Excel's SUBSTRING and POSITION.
- 07Dates I: the serial-number model5 minExcel dates are just numbers counting days since a fixed epoch — once that clicks, date arithmetic stops being magic.
Intermediate
4 chaptersLookups that don't lie, errors that mean something, and clean input.
- 08Lookups: VLOOKUP, INDEX+MATCH, XLOOKUP6 minExcel's JOIN — pulling one table's data into another by a shared key, and where VLOOKUP quietly breaks.
- 09Error values: IFERROR, IFNA, and knowing which to reach for5 minThe eight #-prefixed errors, and the difference between catching an error and hiding one.
- 10Cleaning: TRIM, PROPER, SUBSTITUTE, VALUE5 minTurning messy, human-typed or copy-pasted text into something a formula can actually use.
- 11Duplicates and distinct counts: COUNTIF, UNIQUE5 minFlagging repeated rows and counting how many genuinely different values exist — Excel's DISTINCT.
Advanced
4 chaptersDates that behave, cross-tabs without a pivot table, and the full rollup.
- 12Dates II: business days, deadlines, and ages6 minNETWORKDAYS, WORKDAY, DATEDIF and WEEKDAY — the four date functions interview questions actually reach for.
- 13Cross-tabs: building a pivot table out of formulas6 minSUMIFS with a row criterion and a column criterion is what a pivot table actually computes — build one by hand and the ribbon version stops feeling like magic.
- 14Dynamic arrays: FILTER, SORT, and spill6 minOne formula, many cells: FILTER and SORT return whole ranges that spill onto the grid on their own, no dragging or copying required.
- 15Capstone: clean it, then roll it up7 minThe shape of a real interview task — messy raw data on one side, a clean summary on the other, built from everything in this curriculum.
Prefer to learn by doing? Skip ahead to the Excel question bank any time, the chapters are here whenever you get stuck.
Read the interview-framed version
The chapters above are drills. These cover the same ground as essays — the traps that fail candidates, written for someone reading on the way to an interview.