data-skill-challenges/challenges/basic-excel-challenge

Basic Excel Challenge

A basic excel challenge that tests some skills that would be expected for someone to have basic analyst role. A data-team grade data analyst should fly through this. A Domain Analyst is expected to be able to complete it in the proposed timeline, with possible minor mistakes.

Goals

The challenge requires the candidate to put to use the following skills:

• Be able to read existing tables and understand what's in them.
• Perform filters on a clean table.
• Perform % of total calculations.
• Compute mean and mode statistics of a series.
• Create line charts.
• Perform single key and composite key joins across tables.
• Import CSV files into Excel.
• Run basic arithmetic formulas.

Some of these can be solved manually, through formulas, with pivot tables, etc. It's possible that different candidates use different strategies.

Besides this, you can emphasize more or less the importance of pretty result presentation, reproducibility, methodology explanations, etc. That's up to you and not really defined in the test.

Inventory

• basic_excel_challenge - starting file.xlsx: the workbook that serves as both starting point and instructions for the challenge. Candidate can use a copy of it as his working area.
• rates.csv: a supplementary file that the candidate will have to import into the workboox.

How to use

• Provide the candidate with both basic_excel_challenge - starting file.xlsx and rates.csv.
• Sprinkle any specific instructions you might want to add.
• Send it all to the candidate, provide a timeline and sit tight.

Solutions

We still haven't done them lol. If you do it, please add to the repo.