Excel Skills

Video coming soon

Theory

The question paper requires you to use spreadsheet software as well as statistical software. Spreadsheets are used most heavily in the Finance section — pay and deductions, interest, accumulation, loan schedules and present value — and for straightforward counting and averaging elsewhere.

📗 Excel Workbook — coming soon

A full interactive workbook with practice files is on its way, in the same format as the RStudio one. In the meantime, the spreadsheet work is taught within the Finance and Statistics topics themselves.

Functions You Need

These are the spreadsheet functions named in the course specification. You should be able to use each one and explain what your formula is doing.

Function	Typical use in this course
SUM	Totalling a column of payments or hours
PRODUCT	Multiplying values, such as rate × hours
IF	Applying a rule only when a condition is met — tax bands, overtime thresholds
AND / OR	Combining two conditions inside an IF
ROUND	Rounding money to 2 decimal places
ABS	Size of a difference, ignoring its sign — useful for errors and tolerance
INT	Whole number part — whole years, whole units
GOAL SEEK	Working backwards to a required input — present value, repayments
AVERAGE	Mean of a range
MIN / MAX	Smallest and largest values
MEDIAN	Middle value, for skewed data
COUNTIF	Counting entries that meet a condition
STDEV	Standard deviation of a sample
PEARSON	Correlation coefficient between two ranges

Presentation Matters

Marks are available for a spreadsheet another person can follow. You should be able to:

set up key variables in their own cells before using them in calculations, rather than typing numbers into formulas;
use absolute cell references ($B$2) so a formula still points at the right cell when filled down;
fill down, and copy and rename worksheets;
add a comment explaining what a formula does;
combine data taken from more than one source document.