Hi - Dave here.
Happy Friday!
What is a workday in Excel?
The main way to answer that question is the WORKDAY function.
WORKDAY is designed to return a date in the future or past that is a given number of working days from a start date, excluding weekends and any holidays you specify.
The way WORKDAY works can be confusing because it's hard to see a calendar in your head when you are looking at a formula.
I wanted to visualize this process and, naturally, I wanted to use Excel to do it :)
I came up with the worksheet below, where the WORKDAY function is used to calculate a date 5 working days after the date in B5. The formulas in G5 and G6 show the result with and without the holidays in B11:B13:
=WORKDAY(start,days)
=WORKDAY(start,days,holidays)
[
Download the workbook and read the full explanation]
The start date, days, and holidays are in column B and can be changed as desired. Column G shows the result of adding 5 days with and without holidays. Columns D and E are dynamically generated and exist only to visualize which dates WORKDAY is excluding (shaded in gray), and which dates are final results (highlighted in yellow). These colors are applied with conditional formatting so these columns will update automatically when inputs change. Download the workbook and try it out yourself.
Excel formulas
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Have a great weekend!
Dave
