How to learn Excel, and why most people never quite do

Why watching does not work

A video of somebody writing a VLOOKUP is extremely easy to follow. Every step makes sense as it happens, the result works, and you finish feeling like you could do it. Three days later, in front of your own data, you cannot, and the usual conclusion is that you are bad at Excel.

You are not. Watching tests recognition, and the thing you need at work is recall. They feel identical from the inside and they are different abilities: recognising a formula when you see it costs nothing, and producing one from a blank cell is the entire job. Nothing you did while watching ever asked you to produce anything, so nothing was practised.

The same goes for following a written tutorial with the answer visible, and for copying a formula off a forum and pasting it in. Both work. Neither teaches, and that is why people arrive at their third attempt at learning Excel convinced it is harder than it is.

What works instead

Three things, and the third is the one almost nothing does.

1. 1

   Produce, do not follow

   Start from a blank cell and a stated goal. If the answer is on the screen while you type, you are copying, and copying is the activity that felt like learning last time.

2. 2

   Be wrong early and often

   A formula that fails and gets explained is worth ten that worked. Errors are where the model in your head gets corrected, and a session where nothing went wrong taught you nothing.

3. 3

   Be marked on the method

   This is the one that matters. If something only checks your answer, you can type the right number by hand and be told you are correct, which teaches exactly the habit that ruins spreadsheets.

That third point is the whole design of this site, so it is worth showing rather than claiming. The grid below totals four weeks. The answer is 5,255 either way:

The total above was produced by the spreadsheet engine this site runs, not typed into the page.

The order to learn things in

Excel has several hundred functions and you will use about twenty. The order below matters more than the list, because each one is much harder than it needs to be without the one before it. Most people who stall on lookups stalled on the dollar sign two steps earlier and did not notice.

1. Step 1Excel Basics8 exercises

   What a cell address means, and what a formula is. An hour, and nothing after it makes sense without it.

2. Step 2Basic Formulas5 exercises

   Arithmetic that points at cells, and the order Excel does it in.

3. Step 3SUM and AVERAGE5 exercises

   The five functions that answer most questions about a column.

4. Step 4Cell References5 exercises

   The dollar sign. This is where most people's formulas quietly break.

5. Step 5IF and Logic6 exercises

   Making the sheet decide something, and getting the boundary right.

6. Step 6Lookup Functions6 exercises

   Matching one table against another. This is the one on the job description.

After those six, what you need depends on what you do. Text functions if your data arrives messy, charts if you present, dates and rounding if you report on anything monthly. The full course lists all 17 parts in teaching order.

How long it actually takes

Two honest numbers, both from this course rather than from a guess.

What that does not mean is 7 hours in a weekend. Spread the same hours over three or four weeks and you will remember considerably more of it, because the gaps are doing work: every session that starts by recalling what you did last time is a free round of the practice that actually builds recall.

Anybody telling you Excel takes six months is selling six months of something. Anybody telling you it takes an afternoon is describing recognition, not recall.

What you can learn without paying

A fair amount, and it is worth saying plainly because most pages on this subject do not. You do not need to buy anything to get competent at Excel.

• 19 exercises here need no account and no card. That covers cells, ranges, formulas and totals, which is the part that stops people.
• 46 of the 84 are free once you have an account, which exists so your progress survives a new laptop rather than to gate anything.
• Every written guide and every teaching page on this site is free to everybody, including the function reference.
• Microsoft's own documentation is free, accurate and better than most paid courses at explaining what a function does.
• Your own work is the best material there is. A real spreadsheet you need for something will teach you faster than any exercise, as long as somebody checks it.

What money buys is structure and correction: an order that builds, and something that tells you which of your habits is wrong before it reaches a spreadsheet somebody depends on. That is what the later parts here are, and it is a reasonable thing to decline.

How to tell it is working

Confidence is a bad gauge: it arrives after watching and leaves in front of real data. These are checkable instead. You are getting somewhere when:

• You can say what a copied formula will become before you copy it.
• You reach for a range rather than a chain of plus signs, without deciding to.
• A #N/A makes you check for a trailing space rather than makes you start again.
• You notice that a total covers one row fewer than the table it sits under.
• You can explain to somebody else why typing the answer in is worse than a formula that gives the same answer.

None of those is a function. They are all habits, which is what Excel competence actually consists of, and they are the reason a course organised around being corrected produces something a course organised around topics does not.

Common questions