Excel for your first job: the ten formulas hiring managers assume you already know

'Proficient in MS Excel' is on almost every CV in Nepal, and the first week of almost every office job shows how few people mean it. Nobody expects macros. They expect these ten, used without hesitation.

1. SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT. The basics, but know COUNT counts numbers only and COUNTA counts anything non-empty. Getting the count of filled rows wrong is the first mistake a new hire makes.

2. IF. =IF(A2>50,'Pass','Fail'). One condition, two outcomes. Nest one inside another for three outcomes, and stop there; beyond three, use IFS or a lookup table.

3. SUMIF and COUNTIF. Total sales for one branch, number of invoices over a threshold. The 'IF' family is what turns a list into a report.

4. VLOOKUP, and its replacement XLOOKUP. Given a code, find the name. Given an item, find the price. If your Excel has XLOOKUP, learn that one; it does not break when someone inserts a column.

5. TEXT. Dates and numbers formatted as text for a report or a message: =TEXT(A2,'dd/mm/yyyy'). Also the cause of half the 'why does my date look like a number' questions.

6. TRIM and CLEAN. Data exported from any system arrives with stray spaces. TRIM removes them. If two cells look identical but are not equal, this is why.

7. CONCAT or the ampersand. First name and last name in one cell. =A2&' '&B2.

8. Absolute references. Not a formula, a habit: $A$1 stays fixed when you copy the formula down. The tax rate cell, the exchange rate cell, the total cell. Without the dollar signs, everything below the first row is wrong and looks right.

9. Pivot tables. Not a formula either, but the single most requested skill. Select the data, Insert, PivotTable, drag branch to rows and sales to values, and a thousand-row sheet becomes a five-line summary. Learn this before you learn anything else on this list.

10. Conditional formatting. Highlight cells over budget, overdue dates, duplicates. The report reads itself.

What gets you noticed after that: Freeze Panes so headers stay visible, Data Validation so people can only type valid entries, and a sheet where every input is on one tab and every calculation on another. That last one is the difference between a spreadsheet and a tool someone else can use.

Ask in the Microsoft Excel Skills group for any of these; the practical questions people bring there are better than any tutorial.