WORKDAY
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The WORKDAY function is completely different than WEEKDAY. It's easy to get them twisted though, so let's visualize the difference.
Say you're ordering a sweatshirt on Teespring on March 1, 2010 and it takes 7 days to ship.
We can't just add 7 days to our order date, because the company does not ship on non-business days (weekends/holidays). So, how can we figure out what date it'll ship?
Using a calendar, we can start at March 1, 2010 and skip over weekends until we arrive to 7 business days in the future.
This is exactly what the WORKDAY function does!
The WORKDAY function, given a date and number of days in the future, returns the future date (skipping over weekends and holidays).
Coding a WORKDAY function
Given the following WORKDAY template...
=WORKDAY(start_date, days, [holidays])
...let's figure out when our Coding for Crammers shirt order from above will ship.
Our start_date is going to be the date that we placed the order, which is March 1, 2010. This occurs in cell A2.
=WORKDAY(A2, days, [holidays])
Our days is going to represent how many business days in the future we need to look. This will be 7, since our shirt ships 7 days in the future. This value occurs in cell B2.
=WORKDAY(A2, B2, [holidays])
We can skip over the [holidays] argument for now since it's in brackets.
With these values, we can code our WORKDAY function like so...
...and learn that our CODE ON TAP sweatshirt will ship March 10, 2010.
In the case that this happens to you, make sure that the format of the cell is date. Chances are, it's currently formatted as a regular number.
Using holidays
We can use the [holidays] argument to list dates that should be considered holidays, and therefore not workdays.
For example, what if we wanted to classify March 2, 2010 (Tuesday) as a holiday?
It would move our ship date back one day from March 10 to March 11. Why?
Because March 2, 2010 was a Tuesday, and therefore normally classified as a work/business day. Since we made it a holiday, it essentially became a weekend, therefore pushing our ship date back one day.
The [holidays] argument enables us to list dates to not be considered workdays, when they otherwise would.