Excel Exercises: Where to Practice and a Ladder You Can Build

The best Excel exercises are the ones you do inside Excel itself: start with Microsoft’s free built-in training templates (Take a tour and the Formula tutorial), then move to a graded practice site or build your own small dataset and work through the ladder below. This guide covers where to find trustworthy practice material as of November 2026, and gives you a set of exercises that take you from basic formulas to lookups and PivotTables.

Start with Microsoft’s built-in practice workbooks

Before you go looking elsewhere, use what ships with Excel. Microsoft’s Try it with templates page lists training templates for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For Excel, the Take a tour template is billed as ten quick steps through the basics.

There is also a Formula tutorial template. According to a thread on Microsoft Tech Community, it walks you through Excel’s most common formulas, with worked examples for SUM, COUNT, AVERAGE and VLOOKUP.

To open these templates:

1. Open Excel and go to File > New.
2. Search the template gallery for “tour” or “formula”.
3. Open Take a tour first, then the Formula tutorial.
4. Follow the instructions in the sheets; each tab tells you what to type and where.

Some users in Microsoft’s forums report that download links for these tutorials redirect to the general template store, so searching from File > New is usually the more reliable route. Template names and availability can change between Excel versions.

Free and paid places to practice

If you want exercises that check your answers, there are several established options. Here is how they compare, based on what each provider says about itself (details may change, so check the site before committing time):

A word of warning: a lot of the results for “excel exercises” are scraped PDF copies of workbooks hosted on unrelated university or government subdomains. They are not authoritative, and you cannot tell what is inside. Stick with the official templates and the named providers above.

A practice ladder you can build yourself

Pre-made exercises are useful, but the skill that actually transfers to work is setting up your own data and asking questions of it. Build one small sheet and climb these rungs in order.

Set up the practice data

1. Open a blank workbook.
2. In row 1, type these headers: Date, Region, Rep, Product, Units, Price.
3. Fill in 20 to 30 rows of made-up sales. Use three or four regions, a handful of reps, and three products.
4. Keep the data clean: one header row, no blank rows and no blank columns. Microsoft’s PivotTable guide lists those as requirements, and they make every other exercise easier too.

Rung 1: basic formulas

1. Add a Revenue column that multiplies Units by Price for each row, then fill it down.
2. Below the data, use SUM to total Revenue.
3. Use AVERAGE to find the average number of units per sale.
4. Use COUNT to count how many sales rows you have.

If you completed the Formula tutorial, these should feel familiar. Try writing them without looking.

Rung 2: sorting and filtering

1. Sort the data by Revenue, largest first.
2. Turn on filters and show only one region.
3. Check that your SUM still totals the whole column, not just the visible rows. Understanding that difference is a common stumbling block, and it is worth noticing early.

Rung 3: lookups with XLOOKUP

Create a small second table with two columns: Rep and Team Lead. Then pull the team lead into your main data.

Microsoft’s XLOOKUP documentation gives the syntax as:

=XLOOKUP(lookup_value, lookup_array, return_array, [if_not_found], [match_mode], [search_mode])

Only the first three arguments are required. Exercises to try:

1. Add a Team Lead column and use XLOOKUP to fetch each rep’s lead.
2. Misspell one rep’s name on purpose. Without the fourth argument you will get #N/A; add an if_not_found value such as “Not found” and watch it change.
3. Put the Rep column to the right of Team Lead in your lookup table. XLOOKUP can look in either direction, which VLOOKUP cannot, so the formula should still work.

Note that Microsoft says XLOOKUP is not available in Excel 2016 or Excel 2019. If you are on one of those versions, do this rung with VLOOKUP instead, and keep the lookup column on the left.

Rung 4: PivotTables

This is where practice data pays off. Following Microsoft’s Create a PivotTable steps:

1. Select any cell in your data.
2. Go to Insert > PivotTable.
3. Confirm the table or range, choose New worksheet, and select OK.
4. In the PivotTable Fields pane, drag Region to Rows and Revenue to Values.

Then answer these questions using only the PivotTable:

• Which region had the highest revenue?
• Which rep sold the most units of each product? (Add Rep to Rows and Product to Columns.)
• What happens when you drag Region from Rows to Columns?

Microsoft notes that the Recommended PivotTables feature, where Excel suggests layouts for you, is available only to Microsoft 365 subscribers, and that PivotTables work a little differently depending on your platform. If a menu name does not match exactly, that is likely why.

How to get more out of practice

A few habits make the difference between finishing exercises and actually remembering them:

• Rebuild from memory. The day after you finish a rung, delete your formulas and rewrite them without notes.
• Change the question, not the data. Once a PivotTable works, ask it three new questions before building another one.
• Break things on purpose. Errors like #N/A teach you more about how a function works than a formula that works the first time.
• Use the official reference. When a function confuses you, read its Microsoft Support page. The examples there are maintained alongside the product, so they track changes better than third-party copies.
• Match your version. If your workplace runs an older Excel, practice on that version so you do not rely on functions you will not have.

Which exercises should you pick?

If you are brand new to Excel, do Microsoft’s Take a tour template, then the Formula tutorial, then rungs 1 and 2 above. If you already know the basics and want job-ready skills, skip straight to rungs 3 and 4 and supplement them with a graded set from one of the providers in the table. Either way, the habit that matters most is working on real-looking data and asking it real questions, which is exactly what you will be doing once the practice stops.