Return The Weekday of Date in Excel

Excel: Return The Weekday of Date in Excel/Return The Day of Week of a Date

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Excel: Returning Weekday

To return the weekday of any date in Excel we can use the WEEKDAY formula. The day is given as an whole number, ranging from 1 (Sunday) to 7 (Saturday), by default.

The formula syntax for the WEEKDAY formula is;

WEEKDAY(serial_number,return_type)

Serial_num is any valid date. See how Excel stores dates & times.
Return_type is a number (between 1 and 3) that determines the type of return value. 1, or omitted = 1 (Sunday) through 7 (Saturday). 2 = 1 (Monday) through 7 (Sunday). 3 = 0 (Monday) through 6 (Sunday).

An example of WEEKNUM formula is as shown below

=WEEKDAY(A1)/WEEKDAY(A1,1)
OR
=WEEKDAY(A1,2)
OR
=WEEKDAY(A1,3)

Where A1 houses a valid Excel date.

To hard code the date we could use:

=WEEKDAY("3 Apr 2005",1)

Return Weekday as Weekday Name

The WEEKDAY formula shown above will return the Weekday as a number. However, that is often meaningless as being humans would rather see the the Weekday returned as a Weekday name, i.e. Monday/Mon, Tuesday/Tue etc. There are at least 2 ways we can achieve this. The first is perhaps the simplest and all you need to do is apply a custom number format of DDD or DDDD. That is, select the date cell and go to Format>Cells>Number - Custom. Another similar way is to reference the date cell (e.g. =A1) and format this cells with a custom number format of DDD or DDDD. The BIG advantage to this method is our true underlying date is left as a valid Excel date.

Return Weekday as Weekday Text

If you will not be using the Weekday that is returned in any further calculations we can either of the 2 formulas below (TEXT and WEEKDAY with CHOOSE) to return the Weekday of a date.

=TEXT(A1,"DDDD") OR =TEXT("20 Dec 2005","DDDD")

=CHOOSE(WEEKDAY(A1),"Sunday","Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday","Saturday")
OR
=CHOOSE(WEEKDAY("4 Dec 2005"),"Sunday","Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday","Saturday")

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