What the work involves

You are producing the ground truth an AI model gets measured against. A typical task starts with a scenario — a sales ledger that needs deduplicating, a monthly close that needs a variance report, a headcount file that needs a dashboard — and ends with a finished workbook plus a written account of how you got there. Expect to:

  • Build workbooks from scratch that look like something a real finance or ops team would actually send: named ranges, consistent formatting, no stray helper columns left behind.
  • Write and defend formulas (XLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH, SUMIFS, dynamic arrays, nested IFs) and explain when you'd pick one over another.
  • Construct Pivot Tables and charts that answer a stated business question rather than just displaying data.
  • Audit spreadsheets other people wrote — find the #REF!, the hardcoded total, the range that didn't expand, the date column stored as text — and describe the fix.
  • Document each step clearly enough that a reviewer who wasn't watching can reproduce your result.

What the platform screens for

micro1 runs an AI-led interview before any task work. It probes for Excel that was learned on the job rather than from a course outline: the screen will ask you to talk through a specific workflow you've built, then follow up on the mechanics — which function, which argument, what broke, how you caught it. Vague claims of "advanced Excel" collapse quickly under that follow-up. The other half of the screen is explanation quality, because the deliverable is as much the written reasoning as the workbook. Candidates who can get the right answer but can't say why tend not to pass.

Logistics

Fully remote, contractor engagement, asynchronous. Tasks are claimed and submitted on your own schedule, though projects usually come with a weekly volume expectation and a turnaround window per batch. You need your own licensed desktop Excel — several task types involve features that behave differently or are absent in Excel for the web or Google Sheets. Pay is per hour at observed rates between $30 and $100 depending on seniority and domain background; nothing about volume or duration is guaranteed, and work on these projects typically arrives in waves.