Interviewers often ask about Excel proficiency to understand how you analyze, clean, and summarize data before moving into SQL-based workflows. For SQL roles, a strong answer should connect familiar Excel functions to equivalent database operations.
How would you describe your Excel proficiency, and what complex functions or analyses have you used? In your answer, explain how tasks such as lookups, pivot tables, conditional logic, deduplication, and summary reporting map to SQL concepts.
Keep the answer practical rather than personal. The interviewer is not looking for a list of spreadsheet features alone. They want to hear which advanced Excel techniques you have used, what business problems they solved, and how those same tasks would typically be handled in SQL using filtering, aggregation, grouping, and data-cleaning logic.