On August 17, 2026, the Society of Actuaries updated "The Prometric Center Experience for SOA Written-Answer Exams" to say Prometric computers now have the 2024 versions of Word and Excel. The previous version of the guide, dated December 19, 2023, listed the 2016 versions. If you're sitting ALTAM, ASTAM or an FSA-track written-answer exam, you now get eight years of Excel releases at the testing center, including XLOOKUP, LET, dynamic arrays and IFS.
The guide is a short PDF on the SOA's Exam Day Information page under Written-Answer Exams. It's the authority on what the testing environment contains, so read the current version before your sitting rather than relying on a forum thread or this post.
What's newly available
Excel 2016 predates almost every modern Excel function, so the move to 2024 brings the testing center up to date with what most working actuaries have had for years:
Scroll horizontally to view all columns.
| Now available | What it replaces |
|---|---|
| XLOOKUP | VLOOKUP column counting, INDEX/MATCH pairs |
| LET | Repeating the same subexpression three times inside one formula |
| SORT, SORTBY, FILTER, UNIQUE | Helper columns of LARGE/SMALL calls and manual re-sorting |
| SEQUENCE | Dragging a fill handle to build projection years or payment periods |
| Dynamic array spill | Copying one formula across a grid cell by cell |
| IFS, SWITCH | Deeply nested IF chains |
| TEXTJOIN, CONCAT, MAXIFS, MINIFS | Clumsier 2016-era workarounds (these arrived in Excel 2019) |
| LAMBDA, MAP, SCAN, BYROW | Nothing directly; these are new territory |
| XMATCH, TAKE, DROP, VSTACK, HSTACK | Various positional and array-assembly workarounds |
Some of these matter more than others for actuarial work. XLOOKUP gets rid of the classic exam-day mistake of miscounting a VLOOKUP column index under time pressure. LET lets you name a discount factor or a survival probability once and refer to it by name instead of repeating the expression. SORT and FILTER turn tail-value extraction, the kind of thing CTE and TVaR questions ask for, into a single formula. SEQUENCE builds projection years without dragging. I go through each of these with actuarial examples in the companion post on which Excel 2024 functions are worth knowing.
Word 2024 replaces Word 2016 too, but for the exam the difference is cosmetic. Nothing meaningful changes in how you type, format and submit a written response.
What's still restricted, and what hasn't changed
The restrictions carry over from the prior guide:
- Solver isn't available. If a question needs you to solve for a premium, an interest rate or a reserve basis, that still means Goal Seek or algebra.
- The Analysis ToolPak isn't available, so there's no regression tool or data-analysis add-in. The exams have never required it.
- There's no Help in Word or Excel. F1 is disabled and there's no documentation in the room, so you need to know your function syntax.
- Each file has a 25MB size limit, far more than an exam workbook will ever need.
- The Windows snipping tool and a long list of shortcut keys are disabled, including CTRL-N, CTRL-P, ALT-TAB, F1, F3, F11 and the Windows keys. Ordinary editing shortcuts like copy, paste and undo work normally.
Goal Seek and pivot tables, which people sometimes assume are banned, are both available, as they were under the old guide.
The update changes the software and leaves the format alone. The exam questions and any case studies, formula sheets and tables still arrive as PDF files with a working search function. You still get roughly 10 minutes of instructional tutorial before the clock starts and a 5-minute window after time expires to upload your files. The clock can't be paused, and breaks run on exam time. You can still copy and paste between Word and Excel, including pasting Excel cells into Word as a table.
ALTAM and ASTAM keep their special arrangement: some questions are answered in a paper answer booklet and some directly in the Excel workbook. For ALTAM the tables come as an Excel workbook. For ASTAM no tables are provided, and you're expected to use Excel to compute probabilities and quantiles from common distributions. If you sit either one, pay attention to this line in the current guide: don't upload your Excel file until all of your answer-booklet work is complete. Uploading the workbook ends your access to the on-screen questions, so make the upload the last thing you do in the exam.
Does this change how you should study?
It mostly doesn't. The SOA writes these exams to be solvable with the tools every candidate has, and the released questions confirm it: INDEX/MATCH, VLOOKUP, SUMPRODUCT, NPV, nested IFs and Goal Seek handle everything. You won't fail ALTAM for not knowing XLOOKUP.
It helps most if you already use modern Excel at work. Until now you had to downgrade your habits for exam day and remember which of your everyday functions wouldn't exist on the Prometric machine. You don't have to do that anymore. If XLOOKUP and LET are how you normally work, you can work that way in the exam.
One caution in the other direction: if you practice at home on Microsoft 365, a few of its newest functions (GROUPBY, PIVOTBY, the REGEX functions, Python in Excel) are subscription features that aren't part of the perpetual Excel 2024 release, and the exam machines have no internet connection anyway. If you rely on a function, confirm it exists in Excel 2024 before you build exam habits around it.
If you want to drill the written-answer format itself, FreeFellow has free ALTAM practice questions and ASTAM practice questions, including written-answer drills with model solutions.