31+ Fun Excel Project Ideas (From Beginner To Advanced)

If you’re looking for fun Excel project ideas, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll walk you through some interesting and unique Excel projects that are perfect for beginners and also advanced students.

Making an Excel project not only gives you invaluable experience. But most importantly, your finished spreadsheet could possibly land you a job in your next interview.

That is why we decided to make 31+ Fun Excel Project Ideas for both beginner and advanced students.

Beginner Excel Project Ideas

1. Budget Tracker

Making your own budget tracker helps you keep on top of your finances which makes it easier to pay bills on time, build an emergency fund, or even save for major expenses such as a car or home. This is a perfect excel project for a beginner, as you can work on a simple project that solves a big problem.

Expenses you may want to keep track of:

• Shopping
• Entertainment such as Netflix
• Dining out
• Gifts
• Car maintenance
• Insurance
• Gym Membership

2. To-Do list / Daily Planner / Bucket List Tracker

Making your own to-do list tracker is another interesting one, a to-do list tracker helps you keep track of your short-term and long-term goals. By doing so, you can track your productivity level and determine if you’re on track to finish certain projects, homework or even assignments.

Functions you may want to include on your to-do list:

• Progression bar when a task is completed
• Interactive user input
• Priority scale
• Task due date
• Graphs to show your task completion rate overall

3. Collections Tracker

Pretty much everyone likes to collect stuff. But keeping up with collections isn’t an easy task. A collections organization tracker is a useful way to keep on top of the items you own.

By making a collections tracker it allows you to keep in track of certain things, such as coin collecting, for example, some of you may know that it becomes very difficult to keep track of all the different coins you own, such as the year, purchase date, value, and many more.

Collections you may want to keep track of:

• Online game skins
• Bottles
• Clothing
• Card decks
• Antiques from countries
• Pokemon cards

4. Reading List Tracker

For those who are avid readers, this one is for you. Making a reading list tracker helps you keep track of the books you’ve read, the amount of money you spent, and the type of categories you read most.

This can also be combined with the to-do list tracker to make an ultimate excel tracker.

Functions you may want to include in your reading list tracker:

• Category pie chart
• Amount spent per book
• Progression bar
• Goal to show books to read

5. Jobs application tracker

Have you ever applied for a job and received a phone call? But had absolutely no idea what the phone call was about.

How about when you applied for a job and had no idea what stage you were in the interview process?

Making a job application tracker exactly solves these problems. And help you identify possible areas of improvement and understand the type of jobs you applied for.

Functions you may want to include in your jobs application tracker:

• Basic job description such as job title, job description, company name, closing date and salary
• Job website link
• The date you responded, and the discussions made
• Date when you applied for the job
• Relevant hiring manager contact details
• Hiring Process
• Hyperlink to resume/cover letter used for the job application

6. Meal planner / Grocery list

Making your own Meal Planner/Grocery list is a great way to keep your shopping list organized and helps you understand what specific items you need from the shops.

This perfectly stops that “impulse buys” whenever you’re at the shops.

Functions you may want to include in your Meal planner/Grocery list:

• Ingredients category
• Lunch, breakfast and dinner
• The weeks and days listed
• Price per item
• Calories per meal

7. Weight loss tracker / Fitness planner / Calorie Tracker

Have you ever been exercising and thought, “Hold on, I don’t see any changes?”

Making your own fitness tracker solves this exact problem, it is a great way to keep track of your weight and health and understand your body requirements.

Whether you’re a gym enthusiast or not. Making your own fitness tracker is for everyone. It’s a perfect spreadsheet to define your fitness and weight loss goals, most importantly, track your progress.

Functions you may want to include in your weight loss tracker:

• Weight trend graph
• Activities and exercises checklist per week/day/month
• Weight gain and increased statistics
• Calorie intake deficit and surplus
• Starting weight and goal weight

8. Plant growth tracker

For those botanists and plant growers out there, this one is for you.

A plant growth tracker helps track the growth of a plant or seed. Say you want to grow a special plant or your own garden, and you want to track the growth.

You’ll need to track the exact fertilizer, water, or sunlight the plant needs. Making an excel sheet is a great way to track this.

Functions you may want to include in your plant growth tracker:

• Graphs to track the plant height
• Statistical tables to show the days/weeks/months and the growth height
• Watering, pest, fertilizer log

9. Grade Calculator

College students, this one is for you. Making your own Grade calculator helps you keep track of your college course grades and project how much GPA you’ll receive based on the marks you get per assignment.

This helps you stay on top of your study grades, customize your goals and prioritize different subjects.

10. Dice Roll Simulator

Making a dice roll simulator is a fun way to start with probability in Excel. You may think a dice roll is quite simple, but once you dig further, you soon realize there are methods such as Monte Carlo simulation to analyze the probability of dice throws.

The dice roll simulator can help you further understand and study topics in probability.

Making a dice roll simulator is a beginner-friendly way to test how you can assign values to symbols in excel.

Find out more detailed projects that you can do in our other articles:
15 Fun Excel VBA Practice Projects For Beginners
10 Fun Excel Data Analysis Projects (Perfect For Students)
12 Excel Practice Projects & Exercises To Sharpen Your Skills
10 Engaging Excel Projects For Students (Beginner’s List)
10 Useful Finance Excel Project Ideas (Tracking Your Money)

Intermediate Excel Project Ideas

11. Website Data scraping

Website data scraping is the process of extracting data from a website.

The reason why you may want to scrape a website’s data is so you can either monitor the price of your competitors, conduct price intelligence, news monitoring, generate leads, or even complete market research.

Using Excel to import data from a website is a great way to take advantage of the free public data available on the web.

Data you may want to scrape from a website:

• Comparing prices of products on different websites
• Housing price data
• Mass search job applications

12. Weather forecaster

A weather forecaster helps predict and track the temperature and atmosphere of a location.

By making your own weather forecaster, you can understand how meteorology works and use the data to plan your day.

Functions you may want to include in your weather forecaster:

• Threshold limit to detect if a specific location is good for fishing based on the weather patterns
• A Classifier that states Yes/No to detect if the specific weather pattern suits your agricultural needs
• Determine electricity usage demand based on temperature forecast

13. Debt pay-off tracker

Do you have any debts that need to be paid off?

A great way to keep track of your debts is to make your own debt tracker in Excel, which easily helps you plan either weekly, or monthly payment amounts that you need to finalize any debts you owe.

Making your own Debt tracker is not only a great way to help you understand your finances, but a lot of companies actually charge monthly payments to use their software, whereas Excel is completely free.

14. Study Tracker / Study Planner

A study tracker is a productivity tool for students.

Making your own study tracker helps you study more efficiently and effectively by bringing a sense of “structure” and insight into your study habits.

You will have a complete top to bottom analysis of what type of course you studied the most, how often you study in a day, and how much of it is effective studying.

Functions we recommend adding to your study tracker:

• Dashboard overview of your entire study hour and type of study
• Duration of time you study per day
• Subjects you studied

15. Geographical Heat Maps

A Geographic Heat Map (Geo Heatmap for short) is an interactive visualization that displays your data points on a real map and signifies areas of low and high density. Making your own Geographical heat map is a fun way to visualize longitude and latitude data.

Data you can visualize using geographical heat maps:

• Powerplant locations
• Millionaires per city
• Population density
• Income per capita

16. News Aggregate / RSS feed

RSS (Really Simple Syndication)/News aggregate provides a convenient way for you to receive content “feeds” from various sources.

If you like to have personalized news from multiple different sources, making a news aggregate is a great way to combine all your sources into one place.

This is especially useful for people who are in finance, say for example, you like to have specific TESLA stock news.

Making your own personalized News aggregate can help gather all the news resources relating to TESLA which allows you to determine the overall sentiment of the stock.

Since you are dealing with live data that updates constantly, we recommend using google sheets for these types of projects. As they provide

News you may want to keep track of:

• Financial news
• Economic news
• Worldly events
• Breaking news
• Local news
• Health news and health-related updates

17. Sentiment Analyzer

A sentiment analyzer reviews and classifies the emotion behind a text from a scale of negative, neutral to positive.

Basically, it classifies data from being trained on a large dataset by breaking down a piece of text into topic categories and assigning a score to each category.

And through its gained knowledge, it can classify similar texts to determine their sentiment.

This is extremely useful for tasks where you want to quickly bulk analyze the overall community sentiment.

Data projects where you want to analyze the sentiment:

• Twitter data
• News aggregate data
• Product reviews
• Movie reviews

Advanced Excel Project Ideas

18. Behaviour pattern tracker

Have you ever wondered how much time in a day you have spent eating, working, watching tv, or how mindlessly watching youtube?

Then keeping a behavior pattern logbook is a project for you!

By making a logbook, you can keep track of the duration of the different activities you spent in a day to determine whether you are spending time on a specific activity which allows you to identify and reduce negative habits.

19. Housing price / Real estate investment tracker / Rent Tracker

For those of you who are looking to buy a new home or plan to make a real estate portfolio. Making your own real estate Tracker is a great way to analyze the expenses required to maintain the home.

For instance, you might want to look at the electrical bills and water bills and study how much it costs per month and whether you are returning a profit on the investment from the rental yield.

Functions you may want to add to your real estate tracker:

• Expense tracker per property showing the expense item’s cost, date and category
• Graph to show the rental property income per month of each property
• Tables to show transactions and total volume of rent

20. Mortgage / Home loan repayments calculator

A mortgage calculator helps you track your mortgage payments.

It determines the amount you can borrow and track your weekly/monthly payment requirements to pay off your mortgage.

The concept is similar to the debt repayment tracker, except the mortgage calculator will factor in interest rates or, for the advanced ones, the inflation/deflation rates.

Functions we recommend including on your mortgage calculator:

• Pie chart to show your progress of payments and how much you’ve paid off the mortgage
• Statistic table to show payment number, date, base payment, interest and etc
• Line chart to show your progress in payment

21. Stock market/stocks analyzer / Stock screener

A Stock market/Stocks analyzer helps you study and analyze a stock to see whether it is worth purchasing. Making your own analyzer in Excel is a great way to conduct personalized analysis.

Excel provides you a function of tools that you can do statistical analysis and personalized functions to determine whether a stock is worth purchasing.

This can help with mass filtering stocks that suit your investment needs, for example, some individuals may like high market cap stocks or high volume stocks and etc.

To create this project, you may want to use google sheets, as google provides live price action data from their Yahoo API.

Functions you may want to add in your stock market analyzer:

• Collapsable list, which allows you to filter from exchanges, industry, and stock attribute
• Large statistic table which shows the list of stocks that have been filtered
• Key indicators using conditional statements to indicate whether a stock is a buy or sell
• A small graph within each stock shows the price action

22. Investments / Superannuation tracker

There are plenty of companies online offering paid software to track your portfolio investments, sadly most of them are not very well made, and some of them even sell your personal information.

Creating your own portfolio tracker is a cheap and easy way to help you track your stock portfolio performance.

This is extremely useful if you hold multiple types of investments across a broad range of exchanges and markets.

Since you’ll be using live market data, we recommend using google sheets for this project, as they provide functions that allow you to gather live data from stock exchanges.

If you want to learn how to make your own portfolio tracker, then check out our article “Stock Portfolio Investment Tracker Tutorial (Google Sheets).”

Some investments you may want to keep track of:

• Stocks
• Cryptocurrency
• Real estate
• Silver and Gold
• Hard assets

Functions you may want to add to your investments tracker:

• Return on investment indicator
• Color attributes to signify red for loss and green for profit
• Pie chart to indicate your diversification
• Bar charts to show your profit and loss per investment
• Statistical table to show your investments
  

23. Cryptocurrency coins/asset tracker

With the growing trend of cryptocurrency, there are probably hundreds and even thousands of altcoins and Non-fungible tokens on the market.

This means it becomes exceedingly hard to track them, as you may need to venture off to other exchanges and trackers.

Cryptocurrency assets you may want to keep track of:

• Main cryptocurrency coins and altcoins
• NFT Pictures
• NFT music
• Cryptocurrency initial coin offerings (ICO’s)

24. Accounting Spreadsheet / Income Tax Calculator

Whether you’re a small business or an individual, an accounting spreadsheet can be useful, especially if you have work-related deductions and offsets or deductions.

By making a bookkeeping tracker, you can analyze your income and losses, which greatly helps at the end of the financial year and determines whether you have any tax debts that need to be paid or even identify discrepancies if there are any.

25. Analyzing Data Online / Data Mining

The internet is filled with freely available information, one interesting excel project you can do is to analyze data online. Some websites that offer data are sites like kaggle.com or even the government bureau of statistics and many more.

In doing so, you can create your own statistical analysis and projections.

Here are some data you may want to look at:

• Powerplant data
• Insurance car data
• Housing price data
• Lottery data
• Hospital data

26. Data Forecasting

Data forecasting is when you use previously held historical data to make predictive outcomes of future trends. These types of data are normally quantitative data.

Interestingly, Microsoft actually teaches you how to forecast data on their article “Create a forecast in Excel for Windows“

Here are some data you may want to forecast:

• Business data such as stock level, cost, revenue, orders, etc
• Economic data
• Housing prices
• Stocks
• Sales forecast
• Time series forecast

27. Visually Appealing Interactive dashboards

An interactive dashboard allows you to filter data to find relationships, draw conclusions, and basically use your data to tell a story.

One of the things you may want to do with an interactive dashboard is to make it visually appealing and user-friendly.

Data you may want to visualize using an interactive dashboard:

• Key performance metrics of user data
• Your total net worth which shows your income and expenses
• Revenue of a business
• Personal home dashboard

28. Project Manager

A project manager helps with organizing and managing a project. By making your own project manager in excel, you are completely in control of the dashboard.

This gives you a more tailored approach to managing the progress of a project.

Functions we recommend to include on your project manager:

• Dashboard overview of the entire project status
• Status report
• Gantt chart
• Task manager
• Kanban Board
• Weekly Planner
• Monthly planner
• Notes

29. Sports betting / Bet tracking

Making sports betting spreadsheet in Excel helps you track your win-loss ratio, and betting history and provides performance data with numerous filters as well as a summary graph.

For those who are smart enough, you can actually do statistical analysis to predict the best possible outcome.

30. Horse Betting Predictor

There was a famous story in Bloomberg’s article “The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code“, where an individual made a horse betting algorithm that successfully predicted horses that would win, this yielded him over 1 billion dollars in profit.

This project could be an interesting one. However, you would need to know the concepts of statistical models and advanced statistics to make a horse betting predictor.

31. Sodoku Solver

Sudoku is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. If you are up for the challenge, making your own sodoku solver will test your ability to automate and problem-solve with Excel.

Expert Excel Project Ideas

32. Create your own game

Creating your own game in Excel is a fun way to experiment with Excel’s graphical and user input functions. We have seen people make multiple different types of games, from Crandy crush number saga to even monopoly the possibilities are limitless if you are willing to put in the work.

Games that individuals have made using excel:

• Bow and arrow shooter
• Snake Game
• Tower Defense
• 2048
• Scrabble
• Cellsweeper
• Tetris

33. Create a numerical simulator

Yes, you heard it. Believe it or not, you can actually create your own simulator in Excel.

A numerical simulator is basically a series of mathematical functions performed on excel which is used to predict or simulate a real-world system.

Other simulators that individuals have made using excel:

• Rocket Simulator
• Powerball lottery simulator
• Rollercoaster simulator
• Neural network simulator
• Flight simulator
• Monte Carlo simulation with bank tellers
• Grocery shop simulator

34. Recommendation system

A recommendation system filters and suggests items to users.

For example, if you like certain types of movies, the recommendation system can determine or rate different movies that you’re most likely to watch next.

Building this type of project is a fun way to test your ability to use excel functions to conduct pattern recognition.

To Wrap It Up

In this article, we’ve shown you some interesting excel projects from beginner to advanced. As you can see, Excel is quite powerful, given that you know how to properly use its functions. Making your own projects is a great way to learn by doing. Also, Employers love to see your Excel spreadsheet projects too!

What are the Benefits of making your Own Excel Projects?

• It improves your Confidence in Excel – You ever get the feeling that you have no idea how to use Excel? Or how your Excel skills are useful in the real world? Now’s your chance to work on something meaningful and actually see how Excel is used.

• Use Excel to automate and track your finance or tasks – Excel is widely known for its ability to organize and provide financial data, using an Excel spreadsheet will give you an exact view of how your finances are going.

• Potentially increase your salary – Excel is an extremely transferrable skill, the better you become at Excel, the greater chance you have of getting a promotion or being able to apply for a higher position.

Excel Projects FAQ