How to calculate due dates with WORKDAY

TheWORKDAY functionreturns a date in the future or past that takes into account weekends and, optionally, holidays.

Now, to review, date calculations can be really simple.

If I change C5 to “-1” we get December 21st.

This works because Excel stores all dates as serial numbers.

But what happens when it’s crucial that you skip weekends or holidays?

Well, that’s what the WORKDAY function is for.

WORKDAY skips the weekend.

If I change days to “2” we get December 26th.

Now, December 25th is Christmas, so it wouldn’t normally be treated as a workday.

To take holidays into account, we need to provide a range of dates that represent non-working days.

In that case, you’ll want to switch to theWORKDAY.INTL functionwhich allows you to customize weekends.

WORKDAY.INTL takes another optional argument called “weekend” which goes into the 3rd position, followed by holidays.

For example, if Saturdays are normally workdays, you would supply the code “11” for weekend.

=WORKDAY.INTL(B8,C8,11,G5:G6)

And WORKDAY.INTL will treat Saturdays as workdays.