Introduction

WEEKDAY function in Excel is a type of DATE/TIME function. This function converts a date into a number from 1 to 7 which represents day of the week. For example, 1 represents Sunday and 2 represents Monday and 7 represents Saturday. This function can also be used with other functions for inserting the day of the week.

Syntax

=WEEKDAY(Serial_Number, Return_Type)

Arguments

• Serial_Number: It is the date for which day of the week needs to be found.
• Return_Type: It is the number which represents week mapping scheme. Its default value is 1

Keynotes

• In General formatting of Excel, Dates are in form of serial numbers. Serial number 1 is for 1 JAN, 1900 and the number increases from thereon. For getting it in readable form use the formatting tab.
• The argument used must represent a valid date in Excel format.
• If the arguments used have number values which are out of range of valid excel date, #NUM error is displayed
• If the arguments used have strings which cannot be converted into valid dates, #VALUE error is displayed.

RETURN_TYPE Values:

Return type	Numeric result	Day mapping
1	1-7	Sunday-Saturday
2	1-7	Monday-Sunday
3	0-6	Monday-Sunday
11	1-7	Monday-Sunday
12	1-7	Tuesday-Monday
13	1-7	Wednesday-Tuesday
14	1-7	Thursday-Wednesday
15	1-7	Friday-Thursday
16	1-7	Saturday-Friday
17	1-7	Sunday-Saturday

Examples

In this example, dates are given in column A and WEEKDAY function is used to retrieve day of the week in column B for the corresponding date: