Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel Test: How it is structured and how it can help you hire your best candidate

Use Kandio’s assessment test to assess the candidates, employees, agencies, or freelancers you have in terms of their advanced Microsoft Excel skills.

With this test, you’ll be provided with guidelines and directions on technical skills that your applicants should know, along with our set of test features such as pick and mix testing and anti-cheat technology.

This test is created with the help of data consultant and Excel Champion Castor Valbum, who shared his expertise in everything Microsoft Excel to help you find your own spreadsheet champion.

Castor’s Microsoft Excel test tackles six key areas, all of which require advanced skills from candidates. By testing candidates on these vital areas, their qualifications can be confirmed and evaluated better.

By using this Microsoft Excel test designed by a Champion, you can be assured that you’ll end up with a pool of candidates that can actually walk the talk and do complex tasks on spreadsheets. It’s the simplest way of sifting through candidates and picking only the best of the best.

How would you use this test?

This test can be used to determine the Excel expertise of a candidate and their abilities to:
1. Use advanced functions and formulas, either alone or in combination
2. Work effectively with conditional formatting
3. Create and utilize Pivot Tables for a variety of functions and objectives
4. Draft formulas that can retrieve data or display a specific set of values regardless of the size of datasets.

Which areas (chapters) will be covered in the test, and why was it chosen that way?

Aggregation formulas
These formulas are built-in functions in Excel, and it allows you to apply functions such as AVERAGE, SUM, COUNT, MAX, or MIN and ignore the errors or hidden rows. This is to address the limitations of conditional formatting.

Logical formulas
There are four logical functions that work with logical values, namely AND, OR, XOR, and NOT. These formulas are used to carry out more than one comparison or test multiple functions instead of one.

Date and formatting functions
Excel uses a default date setting, which is often based on the settings in the Control Panel. To change this default setting, one must first have a deep understanding of how Excel stores dates and times before creating customized date formatting and converting dates to another locale.

Pivottables
As one of the most powerful tools in Excel, pivot tables can summarize and analyze large sets of data. That being said, pivot tables are also one of the most complicated functions of Microsoft Excel.

Lookup functions
This function returns a value from a range, either from a row or a column, or from an array. It is often used to look up a value in a one-column or one-row range, then retrieve a value from the same position in a different range. These functions are essential for managing large datasets with several data points.

Array functions
Most of the commonly used functions in Excel are related to arrays that involve multiple calculations. Using array functions help perform complex calculations from multiple data points to achieve different results depending on the formulas as designed.