Technology & Coding

Excel Formulas Every Office Worker Needs

Build, copy, and trust the handful of Excel formulas that cover almost every spreadsheet task you meet at work.

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What you will learn about Excel Formulas Every Office Worker Needs

The 7-day sprint
  1. What a Formula Actually Is. A formula is an instruction that starts with =, points at cells instead of at typed-in numbers, and recalculates by itself whenever those cells change.
  2. The Six Functions You Will Use Every Day. Functions are named shortcuts that take a range of cells and return one summary number, and six of them cover most of what an office worker needs.
  3. Anchoring References With the Dollar Sign. When you copy a formula, its references shift with it unless you lock them with $, and knowing when to lock is what makes one formula fill a whole column correctly.
  4. Making Formulas Decide With IF. IF tests a condition and returns one result when the test is true and another when it is false, which lets a spreadsheet apply a rule instead of waiting for you to judge each row.
  5. Counting and Summing With Conditions. SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, and AVERAGEIFS answer questions about a subset of your data without you filtering, copying, or sorting anything.
  6. Pulling Data From Another List. A lookup matches a key from one list against another list and brings back the matching value, which is how two spreadsheets become one.
  7. Clean Inputs and Ranges That Grow. A formula is only as trustworthy as the data it points at, so clean the text, respect how Excel stores dates, and keep the data in a Table so your ranges update themselves.
The 80/20: the 7 concepts that matter most
  • Reference cells, never retype numbers
  • Anchoring with the dollar sign
  • Conditional aggregation instead of manual filtering
  • Lookups as joining two lists by a key
  • Logic as a plumbing system for true and false
  • Errors are diagnostics, not failures
  • Ranges that maintain themselves
The core idea, explained like you are 5

A formula does not store an answer, it stores directions to other cells, so Excel can work the answer out again every time those cells change.

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.

Created Sep 12, 2026. No mistakes have been reported by learners.

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