An independent guide. Witsy is not affiliated with SHL.
Most Excel screens ask you to pick an answer. SHL's hands you a simulated spreadsheet and grades what you do in it, which makes it the screen where reading about Excel helps least. Here's how it's put together, what trips candidates up, and the preparation that matches it.
As of October 2026, from SHL's published fact sheet and candidate guides. Formats change, and your invitation names the assessment you'll sit, so check it.
The Microsoft Excel 365 simulation typically gives you up to around thirty tasks. Candidates take about twenty-five minutes on average, and up to thirty-five are allowed. Each screen gives you data and an instruction (build this formula, apply this format, sort this range) and you carry it out in the simulated Excel. A shorter Essentials version runs around twenty tasks in about fifteen minutes, and an adaptive multiple-choice variant is also reported. Which one you get depends on the role.
SHL offers a free practice simulation for candidates on its own site. Do it before anything else: it's the only rehearsal that uses the real interface.
A simulation is the one test format you can rehearse closely, because the rehearsal and the exam are the same motion: doing tasks in a spreadsheet against a grader. That's what the practice pages here are: graded exercises in an in-browser sheet. Prioritize what SHL's Excel tasks lean on: formulas and references, lookups, sorting and filtering, and conditional sums. Type every formula out by hand, since that's how the simulation will take them.
Start with the free test below: it shows which of those pages your SHL time depends on most.
Free · nothing to install · your level when you finish
SHL grades what you do in a spreadsheet, and so does the free test. It ends with your level; a free account shows which skills hold and which to drill before the real timer starts.
Take the free Excel testSHL is a trademark of its owner. Witsy is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to SHL; this page is independent preparation guidance.