Only 48% of UK office workers have received formal Microsoft Excel training

Revealed: New 2022 data for UK office workers’ Excel skills

Acuity Training surveyed 1,000 UK office workers to understand more about how good people’s Excel skills’ are in 2022.

Some of the questions Acuity Training wanted to explore further were how good UK office workers are at using Microsoft Excel, how much of their working day they spend using Excel and how often they have encountered problems when using Microsoft Excel.

The survey revealed that 38% of office workers’ time is spent using Excel. Furthermore, 18% of office workers say they spend more than 60% of their day working in Excel.

The data also found that only 48% of people have ever received any formal Excel training and that more than half of UK office workers are self-taught Microsoft Excel users.

Additionally, the survey found that 37% of the people who spend more than half of their day working in Excel have never received any formal training.

Moreover, Acuity Training discovered that on average UK office workers need help from colleagues twice per week with an Excel issue and 13% need help with Excel from colleagues daily.

The survey also revealed that more than half (57%) of office workers place their Excel skills at intermediate.

However, 27% of office workers answered they rate their skills as advanced. 11% rated their expertise as beginner level. Only 6% of office workers rated themselves as experts

Acuity Training’s Director Ben Richardson said: “Since most workers will be asked at some point to use Excel, we wanted to further explore people’s confidence in using the tool.

“It was encouraging to find from the 2022 data that men and women answered as having the same levels of Excel skills. What was less encouraging was older office workers reported lower average levels of Excel skills.

“We hope that our findings are not only informative but raise awareness of the age gap in Excel skills”.