Most, but not all businesses, operations or projects happen during weekdays. So, if you need to report on the number of days that have elapsed between a start date and an end date of a project or payment plan for example then counting weekends in the calculation is not what you want to do, and you will need to avoid those days in your calculations.

The formula – NETWORKDAYS is pretty strightforward and has two required arguments or parts to it.  The syntax is

=NETWORKDAYS(start_date,end_date)

So, an example as ever.  Below is the start date and end date of a short project.  Start Date is in cell C4 and End Date is in D4.

The formula calculates the number of workdays (excluding Saturdays and Sundays), in this example it is  64 days.

So, this is handy enough automatically excluding Saturdays and Sundays, but some projects could and do include Saturdays, Sundays or even both.  Well of course Excel can handle this.  In this in instance we can use the NETWORKDAYS.INTL function.

The difference with formula this is that it includes an extra argument or part, a weekend code, which allows us to specify which days to exclude as a weekend day or days.  The syntax of this formula is

=NETWORKDAYS.INTL(start_date,end_date,weekend)

Let’s apply the same formula- but we know our project ran on Saturdays also.  We need to exclude any Saturdays from being counted as a weekend.

So, we need to select 17 which is Saturday only.  This now increases our work days to 77 days in the period 01/01/2015 to 31/03/2015 as Saturdays are now included as normal working days.

 

An easy way to calculate working days between two dates.  Have you ever used this before?  Let me know in the comments below….

 

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