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Skip weekends while autofilling dates in excel

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skip-weekends-while-filling-dates-ms-excel-autofillOften you may want to fill a column only with weekday dates instead of all dates. Here is a simple trick you can use instead of writing nifty if formulas or manually entering the weekday dates.

When you auto fill dates by dragging mouse (or using menu > edit > fill > series > selecting “type: date”), just use weekdays only option as shown below.

fill-weekdays-dates-in-excel-only-howto

Now you dont have to create project plans with weekends in it 🙂

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35 Responses to “Skip weekends while autofilling dates in excel”

    • Foodie says:

      Hi,
      Is there any way that I will choose which are my "working days"?
      means, I want to leave also Friday as a free day and not only Saturday.
      Or, maybe someday I will pick Tuesday as a day off.

      • Mihai says:

        I need to also peek Wednessday, Thursday and Friday as days off. Also, for Tuesday, I would need to leave it off once every two weeks. Is there a way to easy achieve this, so that I won't actually add to my workload?

  1. Deep says:

    Hi,

    I am using MS Office 2007 and for some reason, it does not show me these options. It just shows me 3 options:

    Copy Cell (Not sure about the exact text)
    Copy with Formatting
    Copy without Formatting

    Any idea how to get those options up?

    Regards,
    Deep

  2. Chandoo says:

    @Deep : I am not so well versed with 2007, but here is how you can do this using menus:

    enter first date of the series
    select the range you want to fill
    go to menu > edit > fill > series
    in the dialog, select date as the series type and "weekdays only" option
    press ok...

    Let me know if this doesnt work...

  3. Deep says:

    Now that was FAST!!!

    I tried it but unfortunately it didn't work..

    Here is the screenshot:

    http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/6573/excelsheetyr2.gif

    This is what I tried..

    I put the date in one row, in another row, added some calculations (as you can see in the image) and drag the content in other rows..

    I could not find any Edit menu so i just clicked on the icon as you have shown in the 2nd image..

    I hope I did the right thing...

  4. Chandoo says:

    Hmm...
    there should be an edit menu as far as I know. Let me check that...

    meanwhile... if it works you can use formulas to fill the series.

    1. just enter the first date
    2. in the 2nd row, enter a formula like =if(weekday(firstdatecell,2)=6,firstdatecell+2, firstdatecell+1)
    3. copy the formula over the rest of the range...

  5. Robert says:

    @Deep:

    you have to use the autofill handle, the small box at the lower right of the active cell. Right click on the autofill handle and drag down to the cells you want to autofill. A menu pops up showing the weekdays only option and others.

  6. Deep says:

    @Chandoo - Thanks but it did not work with my calculations. 🙁

    @Robert - Yes, it worked this time but I guess, in my case it won't work as I want to add up the days from the column on the left. (As shown in the image)

    Basically this is what I want:

    1. I want to define project start date
    2. There are no. of days assigned for each module
    3. I want excel to calculate the date automatically. (By adding up the no. of days and deducting the weekends)

    Any kind of help is appriciated.

    Reagrds,
    Deep

  7. Robert says:

    @Deep,

    sorry, I misunderstood your question, I thought you would be searching for the autofill-function only (values).

    If I got your request corrctly now, you could use the WORKDAY-function, returning the date before or after a specified number of workdays.

    In Excel 2003 and earlier the Add-In Analysis Toolpak has to be installed, but since you are using 2007, it should work immediately.

  8. Chandoo says:

    @Deep.. as Robert suggested, Workday is what you should be using. It will calculate future date based number of working days you want to add to input date. Also, you can use this with your own list of holidays.

  9. Deep says:

    Thanks Robert, Chandoo.. I will try the things.. 🙂

  10. Deep says:

    I tried it and this time it worked.. Thanks to both of you.. you guys made my life much more easier 🙂

  11. [...] You can also customize excel lists so that you can auto-fill, lets say bank holidays in your country or types of beer in your pub. One more auto fill trick. [...]

  12. ibabs says:

    Hello,
    I understand how to turn off the weekend values for a date fill in a regular auto fill. But, what if you are trying to create a custom one, that counts the amount of days in the formula bar, like 2 days, then 5 days, then 1 day etc etc etc, but they must be working days only and they must not include the weekends.
    can that be done?
    thanks!

  13. rem says:

    hi..
    i'm using excel 2007
    I'm trying to insert current date automatically
    then it suppose not to change after i save and open it on the next day.I need it to stay on the issued date.
    i'm using Today function and it is not well work 4 me.
    anybody can help to resolve my prob here?
    please...

  14. Cheng says:

    Hi guys,

    How about if I just wanna fill up with weekend? The way I am doing now is using the function weekday and use filter to get weekend. Would appreciate if any one comes up with a better idea. Thank you very much.

    Regards
    Cheng

  15. Kathy says:

    What happened to being able to indicate the series by adding a few cells and then using the autofill to copy? I can't get this to work - I need 4 rows with the same date skipping weekends.

    2/6/2012
    2/6/2012
    2/6/2012
    2/6/2012
    2/7/2012
    2/7/2012
    2/7/2012
    2/7/2012
    2/8/2012
    2/8/2012
    2/8/2012
    2/8/2012
    2/9/2012
    2/9/2012
    2/9/2012
    2/9/2012

    • Kamlesh says:

      Hi Kathy, sorry for a late comment. However, here's the solution.
      1.) put your 1st desired date in the 1st 4 cells required (e.g. <cell A1:A4> 2/6/2012)
       
      2.) put the following formula as is in the following four cell (i.e. A5:A8)
       
      =IF(WEEKDAY(A1,2)=5,A1+3, A1+1)
      =IF(WEEKDAY(A2,2)=5,A2+3, A1+1)
      =IF(WEEKDAY(A2,2)=5,A2+3, A1+1)
      =IF(WEEKDAY(A2,2)=5,A2+3, A1+1)
       
      Note: "=5" denotes the number of working days in the week
       
               "+3" denotes the number of days on weekends.
               "+1" last denotes the number of days after the working date.
       
      3.) Finally, select cells A4:A8 and then drag drown for furthur dates. The formula will skip Saturday & Sunday in the dates.
       
      Let me know, if you want to tweak the formula as per other ways.

      • Mike says:

        Kamlesh: Thanks for the formula. That was what I was looking for. It works the same in Google Docs Spreadsheets. At first I thought it didn't and did some unnecessary tweaking to make it work.

        I was confused by the "IF(WEEKDAY(A2,2)" the modifier 2. I took it out and surpise, the formula didn't work right. I changed the 5 to 6 and then it worked. Turns out, (you probably know this) the default week starts with Sunday. Using 2 makes it start with Monday.

        Any way, I didn't know about the Weekday function. Thanks for sharing this post.

      • salah says:

        Hi, Kamlesh, before i was using "workday" instead of "weekday" but it didn't work.

        thanks for sharing the right formula.

  16. At this moment I am going to do my breakfast, when having my breakfast
    coming yet again to read further news.

  17. sagari says:

    Hi,
    I'm using excel 2007
    I'm trying to calculate a workday

    4 nov 2014(a1) to 12 nov 2014(a2)

    Normally i'm using Int formula to do this
    =int(a2)-int(a1)

    But, hey thats including weekend too... 😀
    how do you calculate workday with this condition ?
    and if there is not only those day, i mean in a month or two

    Thanks before
    sagari

    • Hui... says:

      @Sagari
      =NETWORKDAYS.INTL(DATE(2014,11,4),DATE(2014,11,12),1)
      =7

      You can also include holidays into the formula by having a list of holidays in say A1:A10
      Then use
      =NETWORKDAYS.INTL(DATE(2014,11,4),DATE(2014,11,12),1,A1:A10)

  18. Vikram says:

    Hi
    i had a query while making a template for one of my school daily task.
    Most of the work in these template includes copy from webpage and paste in the template.

    so the problem here is, whenevr me or my mates try to do ctrl+v
    the format of the cell changes automatically.

    I suggested them to use ctrl+alt+v (text) to paste
    but they are not ok with it. they want me to make template in such a way that it should work with normal ctrl +v

    Any ideas guys ?

  19. Brigitte says:

    Our working week is Tuesday to Saturday if I wish to make a sheet solely using those days is there a formula I can use ?

  20. Balaji Mehtre says:

    I need your support for date.
    I wand to numbering actual working date based on date
    below is expected result... so how can apply formula to get number automatically... please help me get resolve this problem... many thanks in advanced.

    1 8/1/2018
    2 8/2/2018
    3 8/3/2018
    8/4/2018
    8/5/2018
    4 8/6/2018
    5 8/7/2018
    6 8/8/2018
    7 8/9/2018
    8 8/10/2018
    8/11/2018
    8/12/2018
    9 8/13/2018
    10 8/14/2018
    11 8/15/2018
    12 8/16/2018
    13 8/17/2018
    8/18/2018
    8/19/2018
    14 8/20/2018
    15 8/21/2018
    16 8/22/2018
    17 8/23/2018
    18 8/24/2018

  21. Salauddin says:

    Dear Sir,

    I want to make a series of December month which will show all the dates without Fridays.

    Is it Possible sir??

    • Chandoo says:

      Interesting question Salauddin... The built-in options in Excel can't generate dates like this. But you can use simple formulas to make up such a series.

      In first cell (say A1) write the starting date (1-Dec-2019 for example). Makesure this date is not a Friday.
      In the next cell (A2) write =WORKDAY.INTL(A1,1,16)
      Now drag down the A2 cell to fill up dates. Stop when you reach the end of your range of dates.

      If your Excel doesn't have WORKDAY.INTL(), then use the below alternative formula.
      =A1+1+(WEEKDAY(A1)=5)

  22. Salauddin says:

    Thank you, Thank you very much sir. it worked perfectly & I was expecting something like that.

  23. michael says:

    i want to make a template with date that skips fortnightly is it possible in excel

  24. krishna says:

    Hi Chandoo, I need to skip weekends from a specified list of dates.
    from the below information I want to pick only the weekdays amount only along with lookup which has builder name separately.

    Date Builder Units Amount
    06-Jan-08 Doug 8 389
    09-Feb-08 Dave 10 385
    15-Mar-08 Dave 3 771
    18-Apr-08 Brian 5 313
    05-May-08 Larry 10 574
    22-May-08 Rob 8 730
    25-Jun-08 Morgan 4 471
    15-Aug-08 Jones 1 548
    12-Dec-08 Doug 3 323
    10-Apr-09 Dave 5 712
    14-May-09 Dave 9 432
    10-Sep-09 Brian 6 460
    31-Oct-09 Larry 3 741
    18-Sep-08 Rob 8 580
    25-Nov-08 Doug 6 685
    29-Dec-08 Dave 2 401
    24-Mar-09 Dave 10 342
    04-Jul-09 Brian 8 475
    21-Jul-09 Larry 3 535
    07-Aug-09 Rob 3 663
    26-Feb-08 Gill 10 762
    22-Oct-08 Jones 5 425
    08-Nov-08 Doug 1 639
    27-Apr-09 Dave 4 409
    27-Sep-09 Dave 4 612
    01-Sep-08 Brian 6 688
    17-Jun-09 Larry 10 663
    24-Aug-09 Rob 5 608
    23-Jan-08 Morgan 6 388

  25. Lynn says:

    Thank you! I've been struggling with this for ages and today, thanks to this post, I finally figured that I had to customize my toolbar in order to utilise the "Fill" menu. This will make my monthly reports much, much neater

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