Setting A Future Deadline In Workdays. Formula Friday.


Hello, Excellers welcome back to another #Excel tip in my #FormulaFriday 2020 blog post series. Today let’s look at how to set a deadline in the future. I have a list of invoices in Excel that have a deadline to be paid. Once this date has expired, I have 10 working days to pay the outstanding balance. With a quick easy formula, I can get the deadline date in workdays easily populated on my Invoice spreadsheet log. So, here is a sample of my Excel data set.

Add working days to a deadline.  Workday function.

I need to automatically add 10 working days to the deadline date. So, what is the solution?. It is the WORKDAY Function.

The Workday Function Solution.

The Excel WORKDAY function will allow us to add 10 working days to the deadline or Invoice date in our data seen above. It returns a number that represents a date that is the indicated number of working days before or after a date (the starting date). 

The Syntax of WORKDAY Function is

= WORKDAY(start_date, days, [holidays])

Where

start_date -this is the start date to be used. It is a required argument,

days – this represents the number of non-weekend and non-holiday days before or after start_date. A positive value for days yields a future date; a negative value yields a past date. This again is a required argument in the formula.

holidays – this is an optional argument. It is a list of one or more dates to exclude from the working calendar, such as state and federal holidays and floating holidays. The list can be either a range of cells that contain the dates or an array constant of the serial numbers that represent the dates.

Writing The Formula.

Ok, let’s go ahead and write our formula. The first version of our formula is without the optional holidays’ argument in the formula.

=WORKDAY(B3,10)

Add working days to a deadline date without  holidays.  Workday function

The second version of our formula has some specified holidays which are simply dates that are to exclude from the working calendar. I have set two holidays, that of the 4th and 5th of June 2019. These are stored in Column F on my worksheet.

=WORKDAY(B3,10,$F$3:$F$4)

Add working days to a deadline date with holidays.  WORKDAY function

Subsequently, our deadline date to exclude the two specified ‘holiday’ or non-working dates.

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Barbara

Barbara is an experienced data analyst with over 20 years of experience. Author of the How To Excel At Excel Top 50 Excel tips Ebook, YouTuber and Excel Blogger.

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