Test Excel Knowledge

[ajones]

A co-worker asked me the other day about the possibility of an "Excel Test" to test ones knowledge of Excel. Not that the test had to ask about obscure shortcuts "ctrl+bla+bla" does bla.

More formulas and simple data analysis etc.

Has anyone developed such a tool just for fun that they would share?

I started playing with the idea and put some formulas down but my problem was I kept wanting to take it to the "next level". What formulas to even test on can be tricky after you get past =sum().

any thoughts from others?

thanks

Alan

 

[jasonb75]

Why not use questions from the forum? There are many "need formula for an obscure task" questions that you could pass on to your test candidates.

 

[WaterGypsy]

The hardest thing about technical questions like that is that there are often several ways to accomplish the same result so be prepared to have to interpret the answers ..... also some people won't necessarily have been exposed to some techniques used in your questions so it might be easier to discuss sample code to get a feel for how much they understand.

 

[Kaps_mr2]

also it depends on what version of Excel you are using. There are functions in 2007 that weren't available in 2003 and earlier. thanks

Kaps

 

[ajones]

The thought was give a sample / simplified set of data. One set of data would be used for all the question.

Ask a question and have the person put the formula in the marked cell next to the question.

We had thought about offering Excel 2003 and 2007 as options.

There would be a single answer, but multiple ways to get to an answer. Depending on what they do you can see if they "faked it" like manually selecting add row d1+d3+d5 instead of the formula that might have added them up.

Sample questions from this forum are a neat idea, but would have to think about some of them.

i was thinking of things simple like sum, sumif, count, countif, sum based on multiple conditions (array or sumproduct), some text work like a mid() or left/right.

still trying to think though how far to go.

thanks for the responses.

 

[SuperFerret]

VLOOKUP & CONCATENATE are ones which I often suggest to people in our office as they can solve a number of issues. Especially where you may get information from another department/company and need to match it up to your own data...as well as LEFT/RIGHT/MID.