Free Advanced Excel Tutorial — 12 days of formulas
Topic by topic, day by day, with every formula runnable right here in the page. No signup, no installation, no Excel licence needed.
A free, hands-on Advanced Excel course
Twelve short lessons that take you from your first = to a full summary report. Every formula on every page runs in your browser against a real sheet — edit it, break it, run it again. Nothing to install, no signup, no Excel licence needed.
Start with Day 1.
The 12 days
Day 1 — Formulas and cell references
Every formula starts with = and points at cells instead of numbers. Get this right and every…Day 2 — SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT and friends
The six functions that do most of the work in most real spreadsheets.…Day 3 — IF and logical tests
Making a formula decide for itself. This is where a spreadsheet stops adding up and starts t…Day 4 — COUNTIF, SUMIF and the IFS family
Counting and totalling only the rows that match a condition. This is the heart of every MIS …Day 5 — Cleaning text: TRIM, LEFT, RIGHT, MID
Exported data arrives messy. These are the functions that make it usable.…Day 6 — FIND, SUBSTITUTE and splitting text
Splitting a column when you do not know where the split point is.…Day 7 — Working with dates
A date in Excel is just a number wearing a costume. Once you know that, date maths stops bei…Day 8 — VLOOKUP and why it disappoints
The function everyone lists on their CV. Worth knowing properly — including the three things…Day 9 — INDEX, MATCH and XLOOKUP
The lookup that works in any direction and survives someone inserting a column.…Day 10 — Errors, data validation and conditional formatting
Reading the seven errors, and the formulas that stop bad data getting in.…Day 11 — Summary tables — the formula behind a PivotTable
A PivotTable is faster to build. A formula-driven summary is the one that updates itself eve…Day 12 — 12 practice questions
Everything from the first eleven days. Try each one before you open the answer.…The three practice sheets
Every lesson works on one of these. They stay the same throughout, so by Day 12 you know the data as well as you would know your own report.
Sales — 15 orders across four regions
Staff — eight employees
Raw — deliberately messy, for the text lessons
What the playground can and cannot do
The formula engine on this site is written from scratch. It supports around 90 functions — everything these lessons teach, including SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, VLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH, XLOOKUP, the text functions, the date functions and SUMPRODUCT — with real Excel behaviour: errors propagate the way they should, ROUND rounds halves away from zero, FIND is case-sensitive and SEARCH is not.
It deliberately does not cover the parts of Excel that are not formulas: PivotTables, Power Query, charts, macros and VBA. Those need the real application. Day 10 shows you the formulas behind data validation and conditional formatting, which is the part people actually get stuck on, and there are free video lessons for PivotTables and Text to Columns on the courses page.
How to get the most out of it
- Type the formula, do not copy it. The typing is where the learning happens.
- Break things deliberately. Remove a bracket, point at the wrong column. Reading error messages is half the job.
- Check your totals against each other. If the regions do not add up to the grand total, something is wrong — that habit alone will save you.
- Do the exercises at the end of each day before moving on.