Almost every data and business analyst interview has an Excel round. The questions are usually practical: open a file, clean it, answer a business question.
Skills recruiters test
- Lookups: VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, INDEX MATCH, and handling errors with IFERROR.
- Conditional totals: SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, AVERAGEIFS.
- Logic: nested IF, IFS, AND, OR.
- Text and dates: cleaning names, splitting columns, working out ages and due dates.
- Pivot tables: summarising, grouping, calculated fields, slicers.
- Charts and dashboards: picking the right chart and telling the story.
- Data cleaning: duplicates, blanks, wrong data types.
How to prepare
- Practise formulas in a live sheet, not only by reading.
- Solve case studies with real-looking data.
- Prepare answers to common questions. See our data analyst interview questions, business analyst interview questions and Excel interview prep.
- Build one small project you can explain in two minutes.
How to show it on your CV
Do not just write "Advanced Excel". Write what you did: "Built a monthly sales dashboard with pivot tables and slicers" is far stronger. If you have a certificate, add its verification link.