NETWORKDAYS

If you are in the position of Scheduling Projects or managing individuals’ time, knowing the number of Workdays between two dates can be highly important.  Knowing how many business days lie ahead is obviously essential for planning, as is calculating the number of days/hours that have been worked on a project.  

Whereas there are specialized types of software for managing projects, (such as Microsoft Project), Excel can be very useful in this arena.

If you have a set of dates in Excel and you want to calculate the number of Business Days, (excluding weekends and holidays), you can easily do this using the NETWORKDAYS function with the following syntax.  Linking the Dates with Absolute References to cells containing this information is a best practice:

=NETWORKDAYS(StartDate, EndDate, ListOfHolidays)

Similarly, let’s say you have a Start Date for a project and you have a budget of a certain number of workdays to spend completing it.  To calculate the Date that it will be completed, you can easily use the WORKDAY function. Applying the following syntax, you can quickly calculate When the project will be complete:

WORKDAY(StartDate, #OfDays, ListOfHolidays)

Another Best Practice:  Since Excel can occasionally misinterpret (or not understand) some imported data, you can use an additional function to ascertain that the “StartDate” is interpreted correctly.  By using the DATE function in the place for StartDate, you alleviate any concern in this regard.

Calculating workdays with the NETWORKDAYS and WORKDAY functions.  More key tools brought to you by Excel.  Cheers!