Excel formulas, learned by typing them.

Brian Millot is an indie hacker based in France who builds small, focused web products. He built and runs Excel Formula Practice, from the in-browser spreadsheet that checks your formulas to the exercise library, and he writes the formula guides.

Every guide on the site carries his name, and each one shows the date it was last updated, so you always know who wrote what you're reading and how recent it is.

Watching someone else type a formula is easy to follow and easy to forget. Typing it yourself, getting it wrong, and fixing it is what makes it stick. That's the whole idea behind the site: less reading about formulas, more writing them.

It's built for people who need Excel to work for them: preparing for an Excel test in a job application, catching up on the formulas your job expects, or just tired of copying formulas they don't understand.

1. 1

   A real spreadsheet

   Every exercise is a small sheet of realistic data with one clear task, like totalling sales for a region or looking up a price.

2. 2

   You type the formula

   You write it in the answer cell, the way you would in Excel. No multiple choice.

3. 3

   Checked instantly

   The site's own formula engine calculates your formula and compares the result with the expected answer. Some exercises also ask for a specific function, because that's the skill being practiced.

4. 4

   Hints, then the answer

   If you're stuck, hints point you the right way before the full solution is shown.

Each guide covers one function or task. It explains what the function does in plain English, breaks down the syntax argument by argument, works through examples on a small table you can follow along with, and covers the mistakes that trip people up. Every guide includes a live exercise, so you can try the formula on a real sheet straight away.

Guides are updated when Excel changes or when a reader points out something that could be clearer. The "Updated" date on a guide only changes when its content does.

If a formula in a guide is wrong, a step is unclear, or an exercise marks a correct answer as wrong, please send a message with the page and what you typed. Every report is read, and fixes go into the guide or exercise itself.

Excel Formula Practice isn't affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Microsoft. Excel is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.