Learn Excel formulas by writing them
NewA Modern Excel track — FILTER, SORT, UNIQUE and LET, the functions most tutorials predate.
You can follow any Excel tutorial and still freeze on a blank cell. Writing formulas is a different skill from watching someone write them — this trains that one.
- exercises
- 266
- tracks
- 11
- free, no sign-up
- 34
- free with an account
- 90
Total the sales in B6
Type a formula, press Enter| Select all cells | A | B | C |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Product | Sales | |
| 2 | Cordless drill | 1240 | |
| 3 | Extension lead | 385 | |
| 4 | Safety goggles | 156 | |
| 5 | Work gloves | 227 | |
| 6 | Total |
Click B6 and start with an = sign. This is the real thing — same grid, same engine as every exercise.
One real problem, one missing formula
Every exercise drops you into a working spreadsheet with the answer taken out — a total that isn't there, a lookup returning #N/A. You write the fix, not just read about it.
Browse all exercises- 01
Pick something to fix
Every exercise is a small job with the answer missing: a total that is not there, a lookup returning #N/A, a column that will not sort.
11 tracks · 266 exercises
- 02
Type the formula
Into a real grid, with the keys you already use: F2 to edit, arrow keys to build a reference, Tab to accept a function name.
=SUM(B2:B5)
- 03
Find out exactly what broke
Press Check. You get the cell that is wrong and the reason it is wrong — a range one row short, a missing $, text that only looks like a number.
B6 · one row short
Start without an account. Sign in, for free, and every other core track opens, your progress follows you between devices, your streak survives a new laptop, and you show up on the leaderboard.
Today's challenge
A new exercise every morning, plus every day that came before it — a back catalogue that grows by one a day, whether or not you were here for it.
Solve it before midnight UTC to keep your streak going.
Solve itFormula AI · part of Pro
For the sheet in front of you, not the one in the exercise
Formula AI is part of Pro. The interface is open to everyone, so you can see exactly what you would be paying for before you pay for it.
You type
Flag every invoice more than 30 days old as Overdue
You get
=IF(TODAY()-B2>30,"Overdue","")
Why this and not a video
Same hour, same functions, two different results. Here's the difference, stated plainly.
| What you can actually do | Formula Exercises | YouTube Tutorials | Traditional Online Courses |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type formulas into a working grid | Yes | No | Sometimes |
| Find out immediately whether you got it right | Yes | No | Sometimes |
| Be told what kind of mistake you made | Yes | No | No |
| Pick up where you left off | Yes | No | Yes |
| Works without installing Excel | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Costs nothing to start | Yes | Yes | No |
What practising earns you
Not because points matter, but because starting tomorrow's session does. XP, levels, streaks and badges all exist to make the next one easier to begin.
XP for every solve
10 for a Beginner exercise, 20 for Intermediate, 35 for Advanced, and up to 10 more for a first-try answer with no hints.
Levels
XP compounds into levels, and the first few arrive in one sitting — the encouragement is front-loaded on purpose.
Streaks
One exercise a day keeps it alive. Miss a day and it goes back to zero, which is the only threat this site will ever make.
Achievements
There are 20: finishing a track, finishing one without a single wrong answer, practising thirty days straight.
And then there is everyone else
Two global boards, five windows each. Today's board is empty every morning, so somebody who started last year has no head start on you today.
- XP earned
- Counted from the exercises you actually solved and priced by difficulty — not from a number your browser reports.
- Longest streak
- Consecutive days of practice: live on today's board, best-inside-the-window on the rest.
TodayThis weekThis monthThis yearAll time
Players appear under a stable nickname, never an email. Solves count from the moment you are signed in.
The path, start to finish
11 tracks, each ending in something you can use at work. Difficulty ramps inside a track, not across the catalogue.
- 01Free
Foundations
Add up, average and count anything without touching a calculator.
9 exercises
- 02Free
Logic & Decisions
Make your spreadsheet decide things for you with IF.
9 exercises
- 03Free
Text & Cleanup
Turn messy exported data into something you can actually use.
9 exercises
- 04Free
Everyday Maths
Conditional totals, rounding rules and the operators nobody teaches.
7 exercises
- 05Free account
Lookups
Pull a value out of a 10,000-row table in one formula. The job-interview skill.
7 exercises
- 06Free account
Advanced Logic
Replace towers of nested IFs with formulas you can still read next month.
5 exercises
- 07Free account
Statistics
Describe a dataset properly — spread, not just averages.
11 exercises
- 08Free account
Dates & Time
Deadlines, working days and durations — the stuff that silently breaks reports.
10 exercises
- 09Free account
Finance
Loan payments, present value and depreciation — the analyst toolkit.
8 exercises
- 10Free account
Power Tools
The formulas that make colleagues ask how you did that.
6 exercises
- 11Free account
Modern Excel
Dynamic arrays: one formula that fills a whole range and resizes itself.
9 exercises
When one grid is not enough
Guides for the things that take more than an exercise to explain — the index is laid out as a workbook you can filter and sort.
- VSTACK
VSTACK in Excel: Combine Data From Multiple Sheets
Brantwood Garden Centres reported £63,208.10 of October sales against £75,773.35 taken over the counter. Nothing errored. Every branch tab balanced to its own till export, and the group tab is the tidiest formula in the workbook: `=VSTACK(Alderwell:Thurlby!A2:F200)` stacks nine branch sheets into one list and `SUMIFS` reads the list. A stack aligns by position and never by heading, so when Oakmere's new till system wrote Amount in column E and Units in column F, £12,742.60 of sales was filed as a unit count and 486 bags of compost were reported as £486.00. Ferncliffe opened in September, Excel put its tab after Thurlby, and a 3-D reference covers the tabs between the two you name: £7,480.20 never entered the stack. A copy of the Greenhall tab, made for a layout experiment, landed inside the span and counted £9,110.00 twice. Thurlby outgrew `A2:F200` and lost its last fifteen sales. This guide covers stacking sheets end to end: what `VSTACK` and `HSTACK` actually align; the 3-D reference and the two empty bookend sheets that make new tabs join by themselves; why blank cells arrive as 0 rather than blank, and the `FILTER` test that has to say `<>0`; the #N/A padding when widths differ; tables against spans, and which half of the growth you get for free; why `SUMIFS` refuses an array and `SUMPRODUCT` does not; Power Query's Append, which matches on headings instead; five one-cell checks; ten traps; and five exercises.
13 min read
- Dropdown Lists
Dependent Drop-Down Lists in Excel: Build and Audit Them
Halloway Plant Hire raised twelve job sheets in October and invoiced £6,933.00. The month was worth £10,982.00. Every machine went out, every rate on the card was right, and three hires covering 21 days were invoiced at £0.00 a day. The depot and the machine on each row come from two dropdowns, the second narrowed by the first, and the dropdown approved every row on the sheet — in September, when the depot cell beside it said something else. Data Validation runs once, at the moment a value is typed: change the parent afterwards and the child keeps a value its parent no longer allows. The rate column read `=SUMIFS(Rates!D:D,Rates!B:B,$B2,Rates!C:C,$C2)`, a pair that does not exist adds nothing, and nothing adds up to nought rather than to an error. This guide covers dependent dropdowns end to end: the list that narrows, built with `INDIRECT` over named ranges and built again with `UNIQUE` and `FILTER`; why `$C$2` in the Source box gives every row the first row's list; the name that cannot hold a space and the `SUBSTITUTE` that works around it; the named range that stopped short when a machine class was added; paste, which walks straight through validation; the pair check `=COUNTIFS(Rates!$B:$B,$B2,Rates!$C:$C,$C2)=1` that a List rule has no room for; Circle Invalid Data; what to do when the parent changes and the child cannot clear itself; why `SUMIFS` returned nought where `XLOOKUP` would have returned #N/A; five one-cell checks; ten traps; and five exercises.
18 min read
- Date Functions
Prorate a Date Range Across Months in Excel
Marrable Workspace ran October's desk licences and invoiced £12,325.00. The month is worth £10,221.78. Nothing errored and every monthly fee was right: the run charged a whole month to any licence that touched October, so a four-day stop-gap desk was invoiced £310.00 for £40.00 of occupancy and six tenants paid £3,253.22 between them for days they did not have. The second fault points the other way and nobody queried it, because the tenant never got an invoice at all: DL-153 is open-ended, its end date is blank, `MIN` reads a blank as zero, and a contract that ended in 1900 bills nothing — £2,300.00 across September and October. This guide covers splitting date ranges across months: the overlap test that is right and the amount that is not; `=MAX(0,MIN(D2,$J$2)-MAX(C2,$J$1)+1)` and why the `+1` is a billing convention rather than a fudge; which denominator — the real month, a flat 30 days or a 365-day year — and why it is a contract term; the blank end date and the `IF` that guards it; why `MIN` and `MAX` aggregate, so a one-cell total averages the file; the twelve-month grid built from mixed references and `EOMONTH`; counting what is live rather than what started, and the 7.42 desks that is a third answer again; `NETWORKDAYS` when the billing is in working days; whole-month and anniversary billing, where prorating is the error; the same formula pointed at two contracts to find a double-booked desk; five checks above the table; ten traps; and five exercises.
18 min read
Start with the free tracks
4 complete tracks, 34 exercises, no card and no account. If it turns out not to be for you, you have lost nothing.
Questions people ask before they start
How can I practise Excel formulas online for free?
Open the first track and start typing. There are 266 exercises here. The first four tracks need nothing at all, the rest of the 90 core exercises need only a free account, and nothing asks for a card before you find out whether you like it. Each exercise gives you a grid with real data in it, you write a real formula, and it is checked by running it — not by matching the text you typed.
How is this different from an Excel video course?
A video shows you a formula being written. This makes you write it. That sounds like a small difference and it is the whole difference: watching VLOOKUP is not the same skill as producing VLOOKUP with a deadline on you and somebody else's messy export in front of you. Ten minutes of typing beats an hour of watching.
Which Excel formulas should I learn first?
SUM, then IF, then COUNTIF and SUMIF, then VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP, then INDEX/MATCH. That is the order the tracks here run in, because each one leans on the last: SUMIF makes sense once IF does, and INDEX/MATCH only makes sense once you have hit VLOOKUP's limits yourself.
What happens when my formula is wrong?
You get the specific cell, the value your formula produced, and the value it should have produced — not the word "incorrect". Reading that gap is most of what learning formulas actually is. Every valid route to the right answer is accepted, so =B2+B3 and =SUM(B2:B3) both pass.
Can I use this to prepare for an Excel job interview or assessment?
Yes, and it lines up closely with what those tests check. Employer skills tests and interview exercises hand you a sheet of tasks built on IF, VLOOKUP, COUNTIF, absolute references and INDEX/MATCH — the same formulas drilled here. Most of them also score your method rather than only your number, so typing the answer by hand scores zero even when it is right.
Do I need to know Excel already to start?
No. Exercise one is a single addition, and the difficulty climbs from there one new idea at a time. You need no finance or analytics background — if you can open a web page you can start, and by the end of the free tracks you are writing SUMIF and COUNTIF.
Which Excel version do these exercises work with?
The formulas transfer to Excel 2016, 2019, 2021, Microsoft 365 and Excel for the web, and to Google Sheets for most of what is drilled here. The exceptions are the newest additions — XLOOKUP, FILTER, SEQUENCE and the other dynamic arrays need 365 or 2021 — and the reference pages say so on the functions where it matters.
How long does it take to get good at Excel formulas?
For the everyday set — totals, conditions, lookups, cleaning up text — a couple of weeks at ten focused minutes a day is realistic, and that is the honest version rather than a marketing number. Short deliberate practice is what builds recall; one long weekend session mostly builds the illusion of it.
I only use Excel at work. Is that enough to get fluent?
Usually not, and it is the most common trap. Using Excel at work teaches you reactively — you learn a function the day a task forces you to, then never touch it again. The fix is short deliberate practice away from a deadline, which is why the exercises here take five minutes each and need no setup and no data of your own.