The interview is booked, and somewhere in it there's an Excel test. Interview tests are more predictable than they feel: the same handful of skills, in one of three forms. With a few days to go, a course won't help much. What helps is finding the two or three skills you'd stumble on and drilling those. Start by taking the free test below, then use the plan further down.
Free · nothing to install · your level when you finish
The pre-interview screen. A link arrives before you meet anyone: a timed multiple-choice quiz or an interactive simulation from a testing vendor. It filters the pipeline, so a middling score can end the process without anyone telling you why. Which vendors run these tests, and what the employer receives afterwards.
The live exercise. A shared screen, a small dataset, and a task: "total these by region", "find the mismatches between these two lists". It measures fluency, because hesitation shows, but it also rewards something a quiz can't see: how you think. Talk through your approach while you work.
The take-home. A file and a day or two. More forgiving on speed, stricter on quality: clean structure, labelled outputs, and formulas rather than pasted numbers. Expect them to click into your cells and read what's there.
Across formats and seniority, interview Excel tests keep returning to five skills. Each link below opens a graded exercise for that skill in a spreadsheet on the page:
VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP, a staple of employment screens.Evening one: diagnose, then drill the weakest. Take the free test above to see your level; with a free account the skill map shows which skills are shaky. Pick the two weakest and work their practice pages until the solo tasks pass without hints.
Evening two: all five, under interview conditions. Run through the five exercises above, in the order your role weights them. No searching and no notes: you're finding out what you can do cold, because that's what the interview sees. Whatever doesn't pass cold is your review list for the morning.
Narrate your work: "I'll look this up with XLOOKUP so it still works if the columns move." Interviewers judge reasoning as much as keystrokes, and narrating turns a silent stumble into a visible recovery. If you'd normally check syntax, say so: "I always check whether the range or the criterion comes first" reads as experience, not weakness.
When they ask you to rate your Excel out of ten, give skills instead of a number. "I can join datasets with lookups, build pivot tables, and clean exports with text functions" is more credible and harder to argue with. Say only the ones you can back up on the spot; the skill map from the free test shows you which those are.
A few minutes tonight tells you which of the five skills to spend your evenings on, instead of revising everything.
Take the free Excel test