Question 3 — Spreadsheet

two actions, two marks: renaming a sheet and colouring its tab are completely independent operations in Excel, so each is checked and scored separately even though both start from the same right-click menu. Spell the name exactly, since any formula elsewhere that references the sheet by name (Budget!A1, for example) needs an exact match. Renaming first is fine: later formulas will refer to the sheet by its new name automatically, because Excel updates every reference to a sheet the instant you rename it — the link is to the sheet object itself, not to the string you originally typed.

merge across seven cells (1), centre (1), the exact theme shade (1) — three separate, checkable outcomes bundled behind what looks like a single click. Merge & Center does the first two in one click but they are two different marks, because merging and centring are genuinely separate properties: you could merge without centring (left-aligned text in a wide cell) or centre a single unmerged cell, so doing both at once doesn't make them the same action for marking purposes. The colour name appears in the tooltip, so read it instead of guessing by appearance — on screen, several nearby theme swatches can look almost identical, but only the exact named shade ("Red, Accent 2, Lighter 40%") is correct, because theme colours are defined by name/position in the palette, not by how they happen to render on your monitor.

MODE returns the value that occurs most often, which is exactly "most common cohort size" — it's a statistical function built for precisely this question, as opposed to AVERAGE (the typical value) or MAX (the largest value), which answer different questions entirely. 1 mark for the function, 1 for the correct range. Including the heading or B2:B5 would give a wrong answer or a circular reference: the heading is text (not a cohort size at all, so it would corrupt a numeric calculation if MODE tried to include it), and B2:B5 is the answer area itself — a formula in B3 that includes B3's own range is the same self-reference problem explained in the spreadsheets notes.

the marks cover: using a formula (not typing a total), summing column G, multiplying by the rate, referring to B2 instead of typing 19.2 in the formula, and formatting as Rand currency — five genuinely distinct actions chained into one cell. Referring to B2 means that if the rate changes, the result updates: this is the core reason instruction 13 ("use formulas for every calculation") exists at all — a typed, hard-coded number is a frozen snapshot that silently goes stale the moment its inputs change, while a formula referencing B2 recalculates automatically. Alternative: =SUMPRODUCT(G8:G30,B2), which multiplies every value in the range by the rate and adds the results in one step — mathematically equivalent to SUM-then-multiply, just computed in a different order.

COUNTIF counts cells that meet one condition — it's built specifically to answer "how many rows match this criterion," as distinct from SUMIF/SUMIFS (which total a different column based on a condition) or plain COUNT (which only counts numeric cells, regardless of their value). Marks: correct function (1), correct range in column C (1), correct criterion "Platform" (1). Put the criterion in quotes, because Excel treats an unquoted word as a reference to a named cell or range rather than literal text to compare against — quoting it tells Excel explicitly "this is a text value, not a name." COUNT would be wrong because it counts numbers only, and "Platform" is text, so COUNT would return zero regardless of how many rows actually say Platform.

five marks: right lookup function, right lookup value, table on the Costs sheet, correct column index, exact match, with absolute references so it copies down — each is a separate, independently gradeable piece of the formula. When copied, the lookup value moves down one row each time (relative), but the Costs table must stay put (absolute): the whole point of a lookup table is that every row's formula searches the same reference table for its own key, so the key must shift with each row while the table itself must not. If the table was not locked, the range would slide down and eventually return #N/A, because a few rows down the table reference would have drifted past the real data entirely, searching an empty or unrelated range. If Costs is arranged across columns instead of down, use HLOOKUP or XLOOKUP — the horizontal-lookup equivalents of the same underlying search-and-return idea.