This student's question, how to make spreadsheet skills stick when the classroom doesn't push hard enough, is the kind of practical problem that deserves a practical answer. And the short version is this: stop treating spreadsheets as a subject to pass and start treating them as a tool to use. That shift alone will carry you further than any summer syllabus.
The core insight here is that spreadsheets are not a language you memorize; they are a medium you build in. A class that leaves you wanting more work is not a failure of the curriculum, it is an invitation to set your own problems. For an accounting student, the summer is an ideal sandbox. Build a personal budget tracker that flags overspending by category. Model the cost of a semester's textbooks against rental, used, and digital options, then add a sensitivity slider for late fees. Recreate a sample income statement from a public company's annual report and experiment with what happens when COGS changes by five percent. Each of these projects forces you to reach for functions you haven't used yet, XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, nested IFs, and the act of debugging your own formulas is where real learning lodges.
Online resources can fill the gaps, but choose them with the same bias toward action. Look for case-based tutorials that hand you a messy dataset and ask you to clean it, not just watch someone click. The "Spreadsheet as a Database" concept is especially useful for an accounting path: learn to structure tables so that a pivot table can answer three different questions without rewriting a single cell. That kind of design thinking is what separates someone who merely completes assignments from someone who can walk into a fall accounting course and already see how ledgers, trial balances, and reconciliation sheets are just well-organized spreadsheets with validation rules.
The real takeaway is that spreadsheet fluency builds fastest when you have a stake in the output. The student here already has the right instinct, they want more work, and they want it to last. That's exactly the mindset that turns a summer project into a permanent skill. So pick one small problem you actually care about, build something that solves it, and then break it on purpose to learn how it holds together. That cycle is worth more than any course credit.