ICDL Advanced Spreadsheets case studies
ICDL Advanced Spreadsheets · Put your knowledge to work in context.
ICDL Advanced Spreadsheets is an advanced-level spreadsheet certification within the ICDL (formerly ECDL) family of digital-skills credentials. It is designed for candidates who already work confidently with spreadsheets and want formal recognition of higher-end capability: building complex formulas, presenting data in charts, managing and interrogating large data sets, and controlling how workbooks are validated, protected and produced as output. Typical candidates are office professionals, analysts, finance and administration staff, students on business or IT programmes, and trainers who need a vendor-recognised benchmark rather than a software-specific certificate. The syllabus is organised around five skill areas: formatting; formulas and functions; charts; data analysis using tables, filters and pivot tables; and validation, protection and output. The ICDL Advanced Spreadsheets case studies are 5 cases and about 3,047 words.
1The variance column that won't go red
Priya maintains a 240-row regional expense sheet. Column F, Variance, is Actual (D) minus Budget (E).
615 words, about 3 min2Commission tiers that land on the wrong rate
A 120-rep sales workbook stores monthly sales in D2:D121 and region in column B. A tier table on sheet 'Rates' holds lower bounds in G2:G5 (0, 25000, 50000, 100000) and rates in H2:H5 (2%, 3%, 5%, 7%).
576 words, about 3 min3A margin line that sits flat on the floor
A 12-month dashboard plots Revenue in 000s (values from 41 to 58) as columns and Gross Margin % (values 0.021 to 0.038) as a line on the same axis. The line renders as a flat stroke along the bottom, and a manager concludes 'margin is stable'.
635 words, about 3 min4The pivot total that disagrees with the data
A pivot table summarises 5,000 invoice rows: Region on rows, Quarter on columns, Sum of Invoice in values. Its grand total reads 2,140,000, but =SUM(Data!F2:F5001) gives 2,286,500.
590 words, about 3 min5The timesheet nobody can type into
A timesheet template goes to 60 staff. B4:H10 hold hours and are validated as whole numbers between 0 and 12 with an input message; row 11 totals each day.
631 words, about 3 min