How can you calculate the difference between two dates in Excel? And what if you also want to create calculations with dates and exclude weekends and possibly holidays? Let’s look at two Excel functions, WORKDAY, and NETWORKDAYS, that will help you to create calculations with dates that only include working or business days. To see how to create Excel date calculations with these functions, continue reading or watch this video:
While these basic calculations may be helpful for some projects, they don’t exclude weekends. And, what if you’d also like to ignore holidays? For these answers, we need the WORKDAY and NETWORKDAYS functions. Both of these functions assume the work week runs from Monday to Friday. If you need different options for working or business days, there are international variations to these functions. To see examples of how to calculate dates and exclude weekends and holidays, download a sample file of these Excel functions.
The Excel WORKDAY Function
There are 3 parts to the WORKDAY function: the start day, the number of days you want to add, and the holidays you want to exclude. This last argument is optional.
=WORKDAY(start_date, days, [holidays])
The WORKDAY function would also be helpful for other applications, such as creating a reporting timetable or building a simple project timeline. It’s good to know the WORKDAY function does not count the start day.
The Excel NETWORKDAYS Function
If you’d like to calculate the difference between two dates while excluding weekends and holidays, use the NETWORKDAYS function instead. This also looks for 3 arguments: the start date, the end date, and optional holidays.
=NETWORKDAYS(start_date, end_date, [holidays])
Try these functions for more accurate results when you are calculating dates in Excel.
And explore other helpful Microsoft Excel how-to articles to build your Excel skills.
© Dawn Bjork, MCT, MOSM, CSP®, The Software Pro®
Microsoft Certified Trainer, Productivity Speaker, Certified Speaking Professional
Dawn Bjork//www.TheSoftwarePro.com
Dawn Bjork is The Software Pro® and a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) as well as a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), certified Microsoft Office Specialist Master (MOSM), and Certified Virtual Presenter (CVP). Dawn shares smart and easy ways to effectively use software through her work as a productivity speaker, software trainer, virtual presenter, and author of hundreds of training courses and videos.