Learn Excel formulas by writing them
New: a 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
- 90
- tracks
- 11
- free to play
- 34
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 · 90 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
Practise as much as you like without an account. Sign in and 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 itFor the sheet in front of you, not the one in the exercise
The exercises teach you the functions. Formula AI is for the Tuesday afternoon when the file on your screen looks nothing like an exercise.
- Describe it, get the formula — you write it in your own words, a formula you can paste comes back
- Paste a formula, get the explanation — including the one a colleague left behind three jobs ago
- Ask anything Excel — why a lookup misses, which function to reach for, how to lay a sheet out
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
Formula AI turns it into
=IF(TODAY()-B2>30,"Overdue","")
Or the other way round
=INDEX(B:B,MATCH(A2,C:C,0))
Finds A2 in column C and returns the value on that row from column B — a lookup that reads leftwards, which VLOOKUP cannot do.
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 9: 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
- 05Pro
Lookups
Pull a value out of a 10,000-row table in one formula. The job-interview skill.
7 exercises
- 06Pro
Advanced Logic
Replace towers of nested IFs with formulas you can still read next month.
5 exercises
- 07Pro
Statistics
Describe a dataset properly — spread, not just averages.
11 exercises
- 08Pro
Dates & Time
Deadlines, working days and durations — the stuff that silently breaks reports.
10 exercises
- 09Pro
Finance
Loan payments, present value and depreciation — the analyst toolkit.
8 exercises
- 10Pro
Power Tools
The formulas that make colleagues ask how you did that.
6 exercises
- 11Pro
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.
- Duplicates
Duplicates: The Payment Run Came to 39,488.00 and the Invoices Came to 23,081.75
Ten rows went into a supplier payment run totalling 39,488.00. Six invoices were on it, worth 23,081.75, and the other 16,406.25 was four rows that had already been paid — 41.5% of a run that Excel's own Remove Duplicates looked at and deleted exactly one row from, because one supplier name carried a trailing space, one carried a different capital letter, and two copies of the same invoice had been keyed on different days. This guide covers duplicates end to end: the three different things people mean by the word, and why a tool that answers one of them cannot answer the others; what Remove Duplicates actually compares, which columns it forgives and which it does not, and why it is the wrong first move on data you have not yet measured; flagging with COUNTIF and the expanding-range trick that marks the second copy rather than both; putting a number on it, with SUMPRODUCT(D/COUNTIF) returning the 23,081.75 that should have been paid and the subtraction that returns the 16,406.25 that should not; why a two-key COUNTIFS check found three of the four and missed 7,340.00; TRIM, UPPER and a normalised helper key, plus the reason COUNTIF cannot take that key as an array; EXACT for the codes where case is the whole point, and the 15-digit comparison that makes COUNTIF call two different long IDs the same; UNIQUE, FILTER, XLOOKUP and the third argument of UNIQUE that returns only the rows appearing exactly once; data validation that refuses the next one, the paste that walks straight through it, and the Power Query step that re-runs on every refresh — case-sensitively, unlike everything else in Excel; and twelve traps, from the invoice code containing an asterisk to the pivot table that will not count distinct until you tick a box nobody mentions.
20 min read
- Multi-Currency
Multi-Currency Workbooks: January Was 132,549.03 in February and 134,880.05 in March, and Not One Invoice Changed
Eight January invoices in four currencies were converted to euros by multiplying every one of them by the same three rates, typed into three cells in the corner of the sheet. In February that produced 132,549.03 of revenue. In March somebody refreshed the rates and the same eight invoices, none of them touched, produced 134,880.05 — a closed month that moved 2,331.02 between two openings of the same file. The figure that does not move is 132,197.28, because it uses the rate that applied on each invoice's own date. This guide covers multi-currency workbooks end to end: the four rates an accountant means by "the rate" and which number wants which; whether to multiply or divide, and the sanity check that answers it in two seconds; looking a rate up as of a date with INDEX/MATCH type 1, XLOOKUP's -1 search order and the LOOKUP(2,1/...) trick, including what happens on 16 January when the table only publishes Mondays; two-key lookups on wide and long rate tables; where to round and the half-cent it costs; the SUM of a currency column that is denominated in nothing; the 1,251.37 of settlement gain that is not sales; constant-currency reporting, where a month down 0.6% in euros is down 1.8% in the currencies it was actually sold in; freezing the rate onto the row so the past can stop rewriting itself; and twelve traps, from yen with two decimal places to the IFNA that turns a missing rate into free revenue.
21 min read
- Charts
Charts: Eight Months of Growth, One Column Chart, and the 11,704.67 the Picture Could Not Show
Revenue rose 39.3% over eight months and the column chart in the board pack showed exactly that. Advertising spend rose 59.4% in the same eight months, on the sheet directly beside it, and nobody charted it — so the cost of winning an order went from 29.91 to 36.98 without appearing anywhere, and August alone spent 11,704.67 more than January's rate would have. This guide covers charts end to end: picking the shape before picking the colours, and the four questions that decide it; why a bar chart must start at zero and a line chart need not, and how the same on-time figures make either a cliff or a flat line depending on one number in the Bounds box; the combo chart and the secondary axis, which is the only honest way to draw two units together and also the easiest way to make two lines cross wherever you like; the arithmetic behind the plotted numbers, including the average of eight monthly rates that is not the rate for the eight months; sorting a ranking chart with LARGE while leaving a time series alone; what a line chart does with a blank, a zero, an empty string and #N/A, which are four different pictures of the same missing month; charts that grow when a row is added, via a Table or an INDEX-based name; the date axis that shows a missing month and the text axis that hides it; sparklines that fit in a cell; data labels that carry their own number format; and twelve traps, from the deleted column that turns a series into #REF! to the filtered rows a chart quietly stops plotting.
21 min read
Start with the free tracks
Four complete tracks, thirty 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 90 exercises here, the first four tracks are free to solve, and nothing asks for a card or an email 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.