Microsoft Excel is an excellent tool for many different business-related things. You can create a great spreadsheet with lots of information, formulas, graphs, and other work-related elements. And – we’re happy to help you out with many of them!

Most businesses use Excel not only to create some individual elements that would help them do specific tasks but also for some office-related elements that are especially important in the modern corporate structure. Those would be the overtime hours people got, some bonuses, or, like in this case, how many workdays are in the specified period.

The workday function is a really important one, as it allows you to calculate the number of working days within a closed date and include holidays, private vacations, and different work weeks. 

To answer the demand, we’ve prepared one of the more requested tools to organize you better and/or your business and workers. Let’s find out how to calculate the number of business days in a specific time period.

And - if you for some reason don’t have Excel - don’t worry, we got you covered! Check out our low-priced offers for Microsoft Excel! It’s the single best office package so you will not be disappointed! We also have the latest version so you don’t not to worry about your Excel being out of date. Speaking of dates…

It’s really important to first describe what it means - a business day. Well, it depends on the country, but most of them use Saturdays and Sundays as weekends. Sometimes, like in the case of France or other developed countries, you get one special day off during the week, but it’s rather odd than a regular thing, so we’re not going to count those.

In this article, we’re going to consider only the days between Monday and Friday, excluding National holidays, as they tend to be on different days depending on the country. The default holidays, like Christmas, will be considered, though. With that in mind, let’s check how to count the number of business days in Excel.

To do so, we’re going to need a tool called NETWORKDAYS. It’s pretty easy to master. The syntax looks like this:

With this framework, you can also edit the weekends and holiday dates by using NETWORKDAYS.INTL. That way, you’ll be able to edit everything according to your own schedule.

Important Note: If you’re putting the data into Excel, remember not to just put it in the cell with numbers. Use the preferred DATE function so that other formulas can recognize everything you put in as a formula, not just random numbers. To do so, put DATE(YEAR, MONTH, DAY). If you don’t put it in this way, the whole thing will not work.

Important Note 2: Remember to check out the language in your Excel before you enter any functions. It’s highly dependent on your country, so if you put the wrong one, you may have some problems with it. Just put the English version in Google and check the function's name in your language.

It’s not the easiest of functions, but don’t worry; we’ll guide you through it. For starters, if you want to find the number of business days between two dates, you’ll need a valid date. So, pick the date you want to start your count and put it in the cell. Both the start date and end dates have to be in different cells. It could look like this, for example.

Depending on what you put there, you’ll get different results. If you want to exclude holidays, you’ll have to put them in brackets. Use the following formula:

In this formula, we put the starting date in C3, the end date in C4, and our holidays are sitting in C6 and C7.

If you want to exclude default holidays and just take default weekend days as those considered free of work, you’ll need to use the NETWORKDAY.INTL function. It works pretty much the same as the function we’ve taught you before, with small differences. First, let’s put the dates in our cells. Then, put:

That way, you can calculate business days in Excel, excluding holidays. But - what if we want to exclude Saturday as a nonworking day and only keep Sundays and holidays as free of work days? Well, you’ll need to use the same formula but with some tweaks. To consider only Sunday as the only nonworking day in a week, you’ll need to put “11” after the days. Additionally, to add holidays, you’ll have to put those days after 11. It should look like this:

In this formula, you put holidays in C8 cell.

You can also exclude weekends from this formula if you want to consider all working days and national holidays as working. To do so, put:

That way, you will get zero weekends and zero holidays, so you work all the time with nothing funny going on. You can also exclude other days with this Weekday function. Just put one of those in a place where 0 is right now. 0, in the end, means that the day considered in the formula is not a holiday or a weekend, and you must go to work during that day.

You can also add custom “weekends” if you’d like. You can always put it in your formula if you don’t work during a specific day during the week. If that happens and, for example, you have a four-day week at work, you can exclude Friday simply by marking it as a weekend. You can do it like this:

By doing so, the formula will note that the first four days of every week (marked as 0) are to be considered as working days, and the last three of them (marked as 1) are free of work.

Usually, there is a lot of confusion around those Excel formulas, so we’ve prepared little tips bullet-point list to answer all your questions and needs. We hope everything was pretty straightforward, but we understand that sometimes things may seem obvious when they are not like that.

• Remember to put all the dates in the correct order. If, for example, you would put the start day in 2023 and the end date in 2022, the function will show you a negative value and an error.
• Additionally, you cannot use the same date in both cases as the function will show you 1. If the end date is in the past or some other problems have occurred, making it impossible, the function will show you #NUM!.
• As we’ve stated before, remember to put the function in the language of your MS Office. This is the only way it would work.

Counting weekends can be hard sometimes but not with our Excel guide! We hope that everything was explained loud and clear and there is no confusion over what counts as a weekend day and how to exclude holidays from your formula. 

Of course, we know that we’ve only scratched the surface of the Excel formula world, but we’re looking forward to creating more of these guides so that you can be on top of things anytime you use it. 

Also, if you’re running late on your last subscription payment or looking to upgrade, it’s the best time ever! Microsoft Office full versions are extremely affordable nowadays, so do not hesitate to check this one out. And if you do so, remember that we can teach you many different functions of Excel and many other Microsoft programs.

Thanks for checking out our article. Be sure to let us know if you have any questions. As always - we’re glad to have you here. Be sure to watch for more guides and tips on our site regarding the most exciting software/gaming ever created, and let us know if there is any topic you’re thrilled to learn about.