In Excel, you’ll often find yourself working with date values. It’s often useful to add a given number of days to one date to determine a final end date. But what if you need to use working days, avoiding counting weekends? Fortunately, Excel makes this easy. Let’s learn how to use WORKDAY in Microsoft Excel.
How to Use WORKDAY in Excel
Imagine this scenario. You’ve started a new job, and you’ll receive your first vacation time after working 60 days, excluding weekends. You’re thinking of planning a trip, and you want to know the date when you’ll receive your first allotment. Counting manually could quickly become tedious. Fortunately, Excel’s WORKDAY function can help.
WORKDAY, in essence, returns a date a given number of working days after an initial date input. In other words, it counts Monday through Friday, but not weekends.
To use the WORKDAY function, click into any empty cell in an Excel sheet. It’s helpful to set the format to Short Date by clicking on the Cell Format dropdown on Excel’s Home tab. Then, type your start date into a separate cell like A4.
Type an = sign in the cell, announcing to Excel that you’ll be inputting a formula. Continue by adding the WORKDAY function. Your formula should read:
=WORKDAY(
Then, click into cell A4, which contains your start date. Type a comma. Excel now asks for the number of workdays to add to your start date. Type 60, then close your parentheses. Remember that this is counting only the “business days.” The complete formula is:
=WORKDAY(A4,60)
Press Enter on your keyboard, and Excel returns the date 60 working days after your start date: 11/4/21.
As you can see, Excel’s simple, yet powerful WORKDAY function makes date calculations easy. Use it any time you need to count workdays to meet a given goal or milestone.
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