A Microsoft Excel test is a pre-employment hiring assessment that employers use during the recruitment process to check how proficient candidates are with Microsoft Excel. Spreadsheets allow users to input and analyse data efficiently, and are used in all kinds of office jobs; as such, Microsoft Excel Assessment Tests are becoming increasingly common. In this post we will learn how to get prepared for Microsoft Excel Pre Employment Test by looking at Top 50 Excel Test for Job Interview Questions and Answers. We are also going to look at how companies conduct excel skills test, how employers test for Excel skills, review sample questions asked as part of Excel Portion of Job Interview and look at the resources to get prepared for each test the fastest way possible.

In This Article:

Why Employers Test Job Candidates?

Assessing a job candidate’s Microsoft Excel proficiency is an important step in making the right hire. The intermediate Microsoft Excel skills test is helpful in learning if a job candidate understands how to manipulate the many functions, tools, and formulas of Excel to present extensive information, identify key trends, or calculate financial and numerical data.

Microsoft Excel is a complex business application which allows companies to record, track, and analyze data and perform very complex modelling and calculations, essential for measuring company performance, maximizing return on investment, and defining goals. Since Microsoft Excel is used in a lot of organizations, employers would like to make sure that candidates has solid Excel skills and experience using the tool. A new employee who can comfortably navigate is prepared to immediately contribute by producing meaningful, data-driven spreadsheets, reports, and graphs to best serve company needs.

How Employers Test for Excel Skills?

There are multiple providers that conduct the tests and each one of the tests is a little different. Most of the time employers use below providers to conduct the tests

Indeed.com
IKM
SkillCheck
TotalTesting

Because Microsoft Excel is so popular and useful, companies are trying to evaluate candidates by conducting pre-employment assessment test. An Excel Interview Test is a screening process employers use as part of the candidate employment interview to test a potential candidate on their knowledge and proficiency of Microsoft Excel.

Each employer might use a slightly different variation of the Excel test. The Excel Assessment Test typically broken down into a multiple-choice section and an interactive portion. Some tests are timed but some of them do not have a limit on how long applicant can take to answer the questions, but there might be exceptions.

Excel Skill Assessments through questions

There are different types of questions typically being presented during Excel Test :

Multiple Choice Questions
Multiple Answer Questions
True/False Questions

Interactive Test Simulators

It is rare that only one type of question is used during the test – most of the time questions are part of the large pool and testing software randomly selects certain number of questions from the pool and presents them to the candidate.

Hands-On Excel Skill Assessment

Sometimes companies also conduct hands on Excel Job Interview Test when they provide candidates with sample data file as ask them to perform certain tasks with the data, based on instructions provided.

Excel Skills Tested as Part of Test

During Excel Interview employer assesses candidate’s ability to use Microsoft Excel's user interface quickly and efficiently to access the right features and perform simple tasks in the application. It validates fundamental knowledge from determining the best way to open a recently closed Workbook to using the correct formula to perform automatic calculations. Candidates are required to answer true/false, multiple-choice questions and multiple answer questions, based on Excel spreadsheets, charts and tables filled with sample data

Below is the list of topics candidates are tested for:

Follow the correct steps to apply formatting, use formulas or accomplish certain things in spreadsheet
Apply styles, use simple fill patterns and apply formatting
Identify the proper keyboard shortcuts to accomplish tasks more quickly.
Choose the right formula and cell references to automatically calculate values.
Perform basic tasks like hiding rows, preventing cell overflow, and pasting data.

Since each question comes with a strict time limit (one minute or less), the test will also measure a candidate’s ability to quickly format, isolate and manipulate data under a significant amount of pressure without any outside help.

Hands On Abilities Evaluated

Ability to edit Excel worksheets and workbook by identifying common functions, applying basic keyboard shortcuts, and manipulating columns and rows
Ability to apply sorting and filtering options as well as statistical functions to explore and summarize values
Ability to customize the look and feel of a Excel workbook using cell formatting tools

Complexity Levels of Excel Employment Assessment Tests

Microsoft Excel harbor very basic calculations to very advanced data processing and analysis that requires in-depth knowledge of every tools of Excel. Depending on the position candidate is applying for you are likely to face a pre-employment Excel test with varying level of difficulty. Microsoft Excel Employment Assessment tests can be categorized into at least three levels of difficulty:

Microsoft Excel Basics Test: The basic test will evaluate your skills performing basic Excel functions. This can include anything from printing, formatting cells, inserting tables, and so on. If you have used Excel in the past or familiar with other similar applications you should be able to refresh your skills with the quick tutorial, practice sample excel interview questions to pass assessment test. Basic Excel Test for Interview Candidates is a screening process for entry-level or experienced candidates, including administrative assistants, retail store managers, Sales Representatives, Marketing Representatives, Accountants, Entry level Analysts, or any other position that requires using Microsoft Excel.
Intermediate Microsoft Excel test: This test requires more than basic knowledge but is not as complex as the advanced level test. The intermediate Microsoft Excel skills test presents candidates with a series of timed questions designed to assess their knowledge of Microsoft Excel. For passing this test, you will need to study and practice in advance using different tools and resources and ideally have practical experience of solving problems with Microsoft Excel. The Intermediate Excel Test is typically offered to evaluate skills of Business Analysts, Project Managers, Architects and other professionals, that may be responsible for complex decision making.
Advanced Microsoft Excel test: This test is designed for job that require to use Excel in a more complex manner. The test will evaluate your skills with pivot tables, creating macros, filtering, and functions such as IF, IFS, VLOOKUP, SUMIFS, VBA and other advanced concepts used in Microsoft Excel. An advanced Excel user would need to have advanced formula skills. He would have a skill and confidence to make his own formula to adapt to any situation. Typically, this test is offered to Senior Professionals, Executives, Financial Analysts, Scientists and other professionals that may need to use advanced features of Microsoft Excel.

What Employers are Looking For?

Microsoft Excel is a comprehensive tool that allows businesses to record, track, and analyze data essential for measuring company performance, maximizing return on investment, and defining goals – when used to its fullest potential. A new employee who can comfortably navigate Excel is prepared to immediately contribute by producing meaningful, data-driven spreadsheets, reports, and graphs to best serve company needs.

Assessing a job candidate’s Microsoft Excel proficiency is an important step in making the right hire. The Beginners Microsoft Excel skills test is helpful in learning if a job candidate understands how to manipulate the many functions, tools, and formulas of Excel to present extensive information, identify key trends, or calculate financial and numerical data.

Microsoft Excel assessment test helps predict a job candidate’s ability to:

Enter sales figures and properly apply formulas to generate sales totals by date, representative, product or region.
Conditionally format cells with the goal of highlighting specific dates, values, or ranges.
Create bar graphs and pie charts from large datasets to illustrate critical company data, performance metrics, and outlook.

Why Companies Test Data Analysts for Excel Skills?

Data Analyst provide essential services to companies in any industry, as they help facilitate data driven decision making. Companies in nearly every industry can benefit from the work of Data Analysts, from healthcare providers to retail stores to fast food chains. The insights that data analysts bring to an organization can be valuable to employers who want to know more about the needs of their consumer or end user.

Excel is the most popular tool to test skills of Data Analyst, since Excel is used for a variety of purposes such as importing the data, storing and analyzing the data and generating quick summaries and presenting them in the form of reports or an interactive excel dashboard.

How Employers assess candidates Excel Skills?

There are multiple providers that conduct the tests and each one of the tests is a little different. Most of the time employers use below providers to conduct the tests

Indeed.com
IKM
SkillCheck

In this article we will review the types of questions asked, review sample questions and look at the resources to get prepared for each test the fastest way possible.

Interview Questions for Data Analyst

Data Analysis Questions

What are the biggest challenges you might run, when doing data analysis?

Even though each situation might be different, below are the typical challenges that data analysts might run into, when trying to solve business problem

Importing the data into Excel or other tool used (how to convert data provided in one format and bring it into Excel). This might get even more complicated with larger data volumes.
Data Cleansing challenges
- Presence of Duplicate entries and spelling mistakes, reduce data quality.
- If you are extracting data from a poor source, then this could be a problem as you would have to spend a lot of time cleaning the data.
Working with multiple sources: when you combine data from these sources, it may happen that the variation in representation could result in a delay.
Quality of the data: if there is incomplete data, then that could be a problem to perform analysis of data
Selecting the best vehicle to present results: best way to communicate the findings to decision makers in the format easiest to understand. (reports, charts or dashboards)

How to assess quality of the data model?

Even though the answer might vary, below are some criteria to assess the quality of the data model:

Can model be easily consumed by end users (customers) to help facilitate decision making process?
Can model support future extensions and future extensions?
Can model easily support generation of output format: reports or dashboards?

What is the process of Data Analysis?

Data Analysis the process of collecting, cleaning, interpreting, transforming and modeling data to gather insights and generate reports to help make business decisions. Typically data analysis can be broken down into multiple steps:

Data Sources Identification: As part of this step data sources are being identified and ways of extracting and importing the data are being analyzed. This is necessary so that data from master sources can then be used for analysis.
Data Import: The data gets collected from various sources and is stored so that it can be cleaned and prepared. In this step, all the missing values and outliers are removed.
Analyze Data: Once the data is ready, the next step is to analyze the data. A model is run repeatedly for improvements. Then, the mode is validated to check whether it meets the business requirements.
Report Generation: Once the model is implemented and then reports can be generated to help facilitate decision making process.

Excel Pivot Table Questions

What is Pivot Table in Excel?

PivotTable is use to make a summary reports and helps you to convert a large amount of data in a short and presentable form which will help you to understand and analyses the data easily.

How to apply a PivotTable?

PivotTable Option is available at insert tab. You can click on PivotTable option after selecting your data and make it on a same sheet or on a new sheet.

How would you provide a Dynamic range in "Data Source" of Pivot Tables?

To provide a dynamic range in "Data Source" of Pivot tables, first, create a named range using offset function and base the pivot table using a named range created in the first step.

Excel Formulas and Functions Questions

What are the benefits of using formulas in Excel sheet?

Formula makes it easy to calculate the numbers in Excel sheet. It also calculates automatically the number replaced by another number or digit. It is used to make complex calculations easy.

What are the most used functions in Microsoft Excel?

Following are the functions available in Excel for manipulating the data:

Common Functions – SUM, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX
Math and Financial Functions – SQRT, DEGREE, RAND(), GCD
Logical Functions – IF, AND, Or, FALSE, TRUE
Date and Time functions – NOW(), DATEVALUE(), WEEKDAY(NOW())
Index Match functions – VLOOKUP and INDEX MATCH

How we can calculate average?

We can calculate average by using average formula which will help you to calculate average of any list.

Which formula is use for sum if there is a condition?

Sumif, Sumifs and Dsum formulas are used to get conditional sum, conditional sum means when you want a sum of one value from a range.

What is the function of SUMIF?

SUMIF is use to get a sum when there is one condition. (It uses one range, one criteria, and one Sum range)

What is the function of Sumifs? And difference between sumif and sumifs?

SUMIFS is use when you have multiple criteria to sum. It uses one sum range, and multiple criteria ranges to calculate a sum of a specific criteria’s.

What is the difference between Sumifs and DSum?

Sumif and Dsum both are use to calculate a sum when there is multiple criteria’s. but the main difference between both functions are:

Dsum need heading of the table to sum but Sumif not required.
Sumif or sumifs need all criteria’s to be written at a time otherwise answer will be zero but the dsum not required all criteria to be written.

Excel How-To Questions

How can you wrap the text within a cell?

You must select the text you want to wrap, and then click wrap text from the home tab and you can wrap the text within a cell.

How would you hide or show the ribbon?

You can hide or show (minimize or maximize) the ribbon pressing a “^” button at the button right corner of the ribbon (see image below where button is highlighted in red) or by pressing CNTRL F1.

How to remove leading / trailing spaces in a text in Excel?

To remove of leading, trailing, and double spaces, you need to use the TRIM function.

For example, if you have a text string in cell A1 and you want to remove the spaces, you can use the following formula:

=TRIM(A1)

TRIM function doesn't remove single spaces between words.

Excel Keyboard Shortcuts Questions

What is the keyboard shortcut to put the filter on data in Microsoft Excel ?

User would need to select the top row of data you need to apply quick filter to and press Ctrl+Shift+L keyboard shortcut key to put the filter in data.

Which keyboard shortcut would you use to move to the previous worksheet and next sheet?

To move to the previous worksheet, you will use the keys Ctrl + Pg Up, and to move to the next sheet you will use keys Ctrl + PgDown.

What is the keyboard shortcut to Hide/Show Ribbon in Excel?

Ribbon refers to the topmost area of the application that contains menu items and toolbars available in MS-Excel. Ribbon can be shown/hidden using CTRL+F1.

What is the keyboard shortcut to put the filter on data in Microsoft Excel 2016 or Excel 2019?

Answer: Select the top row of data you need to apply quick filter to and press Ctrl+Shift+L keyboard shortcut key to put the filter in data.

Excel Conceptual Questions

How can you sum up the Rows and Column number quickly in the Excel sheet?

By using SUM function, you can get the total sum of the rows and columns, in an Excel worksheet and the short key auto sum is ALT + =.

What are the typical errors in Excel?

Below are the typical errors in Excel:

- - #N/A Error: ‘Value Not Available’ error. You will see this when you use a lookup formula and it can’t find the value (hence Not Available).
  - #DIV/0! Error: Typically this error is displayed when a number is divided by 0. This is called the division error.
  - #VALUE! Error: Typically this error occurs when you use an incorrect data type in a formula.
  - #REF! Error: Typically this error occurs when reference in the formula is no longer valid. This could be the case when the formula refers to a cell reference and that cell reference does not exist (happens when you delete a row/column or worksheet that was referred in the formula).
  - #NAME ERROR: This error is likely to a result of a misspelled function.
  - #NUM ERROR: Number error can occur if you try and calculate a very large value in Excel. For example, =194^643 will return a number error.

General Tips for Excel Assessment Tests

If you can navigate between questions go through the entire test and do the easiest, shortest questions first. Save the more difficult questions to come back to later; perhaps another part of the test will help you out with that question or trigger knowledge that you didn’t think you had and you already answered the questions you know the answers for.
Keep a positive attitude throughout the test and stay relaxed. People who are positive and relaxed do better on tests than those who are negative and stressed out.
Consider using flashcards to help you study. You can purchase blank flashcards or create them yourself from paper and put your questions and answers. Create flashcards for the questions you have missed in the past, so you can refresh the knowledge.
Understand how much time you have to complete the test by dividing number of question in the test to the allotted time to determine time per question average you should use. Use this calculated average as a baseline and try to limit the time you spend on each question.
Always watch for time remaining and be prepared to submit test results, before time expires.
Even if you have no idea about the answer you still should try to guess and answer the question, since your guess might be correct

Video: Excel Interview Questions For Data Analyst

In this video you will learn how to pass Excel Interview Test for Data Analyst. Data Analysts help data retrieve and gather data, organize it make it understandable for end users and use it to answer business questions and reach meaningful conclusions. Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.howtoanalyzedata.net/youtube

A lot of times during interview companies are evaluating Data Analyst skills by using Microsoft Excel, since Excel over the years became very powerful tool and now days can be used to gauge skills of Data Analyst.

In this video I will show sample series of steps, completed in Excel from the real assessment test on interview, which could be used to better understand your readiness for Data Analyst. I will also share with you some insights related to the data analyst other responsibilities, which you might be queried on as part of the interview.

Assessment Test & Job Interview Preparation

Data Analyst: Excel Interview and Assessment Test Questions