Any post that touches money, stock, beneficiary lists or reports comes with an Excel test: finance and accounts, admin and HR, logistics, M&E, data entry, cashiers at banks and mobile money agents. It lasts 30 to 45 minutes on an office laptop. You get a file with a small dataset, for example 200 rows of cash transfer payments or twelve months of branch expenses, and a printed list of four to six tasks. The panel does not care whether you learned Excel at university or on YouTube; it cares whether the totals are right.
- Basic formulas: SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, MIN, MAX, and a percentage column (part divided by total, formatted as %).
- Sort and filter: largest payments first, only one region, blanks and duplicates. Conditional formatting to highlight duplicates in an ID or phone column.
- SUMIF and COUNTIF: total paid per district, number of women on the list.
- VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP: match a payment list against an approved registration list and find who is missing or extra.
- A pivot table: payments by region and month in two minutes, and a simple bar or line chart from it.
- Checking totals: the file often has a planted trap, a duplicated row, a total typed by hand that does not match, a phone number with eight digits. Finding it is the real test.
- Sometimes also: format a one-page letter in Word, or type a paragraph for speed and accuracy.
- 1Days 1 and 2: build your own sheet of 100 fake payments (name, district, sex, phone, amount). Practise SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT and a percentage column until you do them without thinking.
- 2Day 3: sort, filter, conditional formatting for duplicates, SUMIF and COUNTIF by district and by sex.
- 3Day 4: make a second list with 90 of the names and use XLOOKUP (or VLOOKUP) to find the ten missing ones.
- 4Day 5: a pivot table by district and month, then a chart. Save the file under a new name each time.
- 5Days 6 and 7: a timed mock. Set 30 minutes, give yourself five tasks, and plant one wrong total and one duplicate to find. Repeat on day 7 and beat your time.