Excel Skills Employers Expect: Basic to Advanced

Basic skills are expected in most office roles, and employers often assume you have them even when the advert does not say so. You should be able to build a clear, readable spreadsheet and handle everyday calculations without help.

Accuracy matters as much as speed at this level. A neat sheet with consistent formatting, clear headings and correct totals is often more valuable than a complicated one that nobody else can follow.

• Entering, editing and formatting data, including numbers, dates and currency.
• Basic formulas: SUM, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX and COUNT.
• Sorting and filtering lists.
• Relative and absolute references, such as A1 versus $A$1.
• Simple charts and print-ready layouts.

Intermediate skills are commonly requested for roles in finance, sales support, operations, HR and data entry with analysis. Here you move from typing numbers to answering questions with data.

Pivot tables are often the skill that makes the biggest difference at this level, because they let you summarise thousands of rows in seconds. Lookup functions are a close second: combining information from two lists is a daily task in many jobs.

• Logical functions such as IF, AND and OR, including nested IFs.
• Conditional totals with SUMIFS, COUNTIFS and AVERAGEIFS.
• Lookups with VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH, or XLOOKUP in newer versions.
• Pivot tables and pivot charts.
• Conditional formatting, data validation and drop-down lists.
• Text and date functions for cleaning data.

Advanced skills are usually expected for analyst, finance, reporting and data roles. The focus shifts to building reliable models and saving time through automation.

Not every advanced role needs all of these. Read the advert carefully: a financial analyst role may stress modelling and scenarios, while a reporting role may stress Power Query and dashboards. Our career guide for data roles explains how Excel fits alongside tools such as SQL and Python.

• Dynamic array functions such as FILTER, SORT and UNIQUE.
• Power Query for importing and cleaning data from several sources.
• Data models and Power Pivot for larger datasets.
• What-if analysis, scenarios and Goal Seek.
• Dashboards that combine pivot tables, charts and slicers.
• Macros and basic VBA to automate repetitive tasks.

The fastest way to improve is to work on realistic data rather than only watching tutorials. Download a public dataset, or create a sample sales or expenses list, and set yourself questions: which product sold most each month, which region is growing, which entries are duplicated?

Learn one function at a time and use it on several problems before moving on. Keep a personal cheat sheet of formulas you have used successfully, with a short example of each. Keyboard shortcuts for navigation and selection also save a surprising amount of time.

Many employers test Excel during hiring, sometimes with a short practical task. Instead of writing 'advanced Excel' on your CV, name the specific skills you use, such as pivot tables, XLOOKUP and Power Query, and describe a task you completed with them.

You can take a free Excel test on Talaskill to check your level before an employer does, and read the Excel skills guide to see which topics to strengthen next. A small portfolio file, such as a dashboard built on public data, can also make a strong talking point in interviews.