Technology & Coding

Excel Formulas Every Office Worker Needs

Build, fix, and trust everyday spreadsheet formulas so your reports update themselves instead of eating your afternoon.

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What you will learn about Excel Formulas Every Office Worker Needs

The 7-day sprint
  1. How a Formula Actually Works. A formula starts with an equals sign, points at cells instead of at typed numbers, and recalculates automatically whenever those cells change.
  2. Relative and Absolute References. A dollar sign locks part of a cell address so that when you copy a formula, some references travel with it and others stay pinned in place.
  3. The Core Functions You Will Use Daily. A handful of built-in functions, mainly SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, COUNTA, MIN, MAX, and ROUND, cover most of the arithmetic an office worker ever needs.
  4. Decisions With IF, AND, OR, and IFERROR. IF tests a condition and returns one thing when it is true and another when it is false, which lets a spreadsheet make simple decisions instead of just adding.
  5. Counting and Summing With Criteria. SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, and AVERAGEIFS answer questions like how much did the north region sell in March, without you ever sorting or filtering the data.
  6. Lookups That Pull Data Between Sheets. A lookup formula finds a matching key in another table and returns a related value, which is how two separate lists become one connected report.
  7. Cleaning Text and Dates, Then Auditing Your Work. Messy input is the main reason formulas fail, so cleaning text and dates and then checking your own logic is the skill that makes everything from days one to six reliable.
The 80/20: the 7 concepts that matter most
  • References Are the Whole Game
  • Conditional Aggregation With SUMIFS and COUNTIFS
  • Lookups to Join Two Tables
  • IF Logic and Error Handling
  • Clean, Consistent Data Structure
  • Text and Date Hygiene
  • Auditing and Sanity Checks
The core idea, explained like you are 5

A formula is an instruction that points at cells rather than storing answers, so the spreadsheet recalculates the result for you every time the underlying data changes.

Then the quiz and the ladder

10 questions that correct you when you are wrong, and beginner, intermediate, advanced levels, each with a practical exercise.

Excel Formulas Every Office Worker Needs: learn it in 7 days | WholeTopic