Hi everyone,
I'm interviewing with 2 CRE firms currently, both of which will require Excel tests. Can anyone recommend what sorts of functions I should know? Seeing that these are entry positions (New Grad) I don't think any modelling would be required. The job descriptions both simply state vlookup & pivot tables.
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I recently started a job as a Junior Financial Analyst and had to take an excel test. I studied a week in advance on putting together Pro Formas from dummy examples and none of it was on the assessment. I would recommend you at least have the basics of creating a proforma down but really focus on IF statements, CONCATENATE, V&HLOOKUP, and touch up on your conditional formatting. Really make sure you're able to find errors between two varying sets of data and pull information from a set if you're asked. Good luck!
I would argue that you should learn INDEX / MATCH instead of VLOOKUP. It's dynamic and much more versatile.
You can do a lot if you master INDEX / MATCH and SUMIFS.
I see your INDEX/MATCH and raise you with OFFSET/MATCH/MATCH. You dont have to define a range like with INDEX, just select an anchor point for the OFFSET. More dynamic. Also SUMPRODUCT. There's some really interesting stuff out there like being able to apply filters using SUMPRODUCT. Agree on SUMIF, as well as SUMIFS.
OFFSET is certainly a handy function but it is volatile and can slow down a big model significantly. Agree on SUMPRODUCT.
It can be volatile, but we use it extensively in this massive model we have (about 3.6G in an .xlsb format) What helps is the 16G SSD drive on my laptop.
It is always a volatile function, that's a specific thing, it's a type of excel function that must recalculate every the excel recalculates something.
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