WEEKDAY Function in Excel

 

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Additional Information:

When using dates, we normally talk in terms of days, months and years. As Excel is often used for monthly reporting, this tends to be how we view dates in Excel.

Unfortunately, there is also a need to monitor weekly statistics; for instance, we may wish to discover if sales are higher on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. The WEEKDAY function can be used to identify the day of the week associated with a certain date.

The WEEKDAY function provides a number between 1 and 7 that can be converted to text using lookups, as demonstrated in the video. The reason for returning "4" and not "Wednesday" is that a numerical value can afford you greater flexibility in manipulating the output. Note that although "1" = "Sunday" in the video, you can start the week on a different day. Then the function takes the form "=WEEKDAY(inputdate, 2)" if, for example, you wished to start the week on the 2nd day of the standard week e.g. Monday. The best approach to learning the WEEKDAY function is simply to play around with it.