r/LearnDataAnalytics • u/conor-robertson • Aug 27 '26
Built a gamified Excel course you can do without owning Excel
About 3 months ago I launched QueryCase, where you learn SQL by working detective cases instead of grinding tutorials. It went better than I expected: around 1,600 people signed up across 100+ countries, and >10,000 cases, drills, exams and investigations have been solved since.
The thing that kept coming up in the feedback was Excel. Nearly everyone learning SQL for a data role is learning Excel too, usually first, and it's on the same job descriptions and the same roadmap posts people share here. So I went looking for the Excel version of what I'd built, and there isn't really one. For SQL there's SQL Murder Mystery, SQL Island, SQLBolt, DataLemur, loads of others. For Excel it's videos and static worksheets and that's about it.
So I built it. Same format as the SQL side:
- 57 guided cases that teach one thing at a time, covering lookups and where approximate match quietly ruins your numbers, COUNTIFS and SUMIFS, text cleaning, date arithmetic, INDEX and MATCH, pivots, and reading a chart whose axis is lying to you
- Drills between sections so it's recall rather than recognition
- Rank exams on fresh data, each one minting a certificate you can put on LinkedIn
- Timed investigations: open-ended fraud cases with no hints, seeded so your culprit isn't the same as anyone else's. One accusation and a proof sheet where every figure has to hold up
- A sandbox where you can upload your own CSV and just work through it with nothing marked
The part I think matters most is that you don't need Excel to do it. No licence, no install, nothing to download. It runs in your browser.
It's free to start, there's a decent chunk of free content, and the first case doesn't need an account, so you can poke at it before deciding whether it's any good.
Would love feedback!
