by For the accountants, calculating the number of working days, the number of working days of employees is a time-consuming task. Instead of using manual methods like counting hands to calculate the number of working days. Excel gives you a NETWORKDAYS function that calculates the number of full-time workdays between two dates accurately and quickly.
Syntax: =NETWORKDAYS (start_date, end_date, [holidays])
The NETWORKDAYS function syntax has the following arguments:
- start_date – This is the start date that you wish to use in the calculation. This value should be entered as serial date always, not a text date.
- end_date – This is the end date that you wish to use in the calculation. This value should be entered as a serial date always, not a text date.
- holidays – This is optional in the syntax of the function. This is the list of total holidays to be excluded from the workday calculation. You can enter this option as a range of cells that contains the holiday dates (i.e. F2:F5) or as the list of serial numbers that are already representing the holiday dates.
Note: Weekend – specifies which weekdays should be counted as weekend days. This can be either a number or a string, as demonstrated below.
| Number | Weekend days |
| 1 or omitted | Saturday, Sunday |
| 2 | Sunday, Monday |
| 3 | Monday, Tuesday |
| 4 | Tuesday, Wednesday |
| 5 | Wednesday, Thursday |
| 6 | Thursday, Friday |
| 7 | Friday, Saturday |
| 11 | Sunday only |
| 12 | Monday only |
| 13 | Tuesday only |
| 14 | Wednesday only |
| 15 | Thursday only |
| 16 | Friday only |
| 17 | Saturday only |
Example: Let’s look at some Excel NETWORKDAYS function examples and explore how to use the NETWORKDAYS function as a worksheet function in Microsoft Excel:
Syntax: =NETWORKDAYS(B2,C2,A2:A6)
Result:
Same:
=NETWORKDAYS(B3,C3,A2:A6)
Result: 5046
=NETWORKDAYS(B4,C4,A2:A6)
Result: 7581
=NETWORKDAYS(B5,C5,A2:A6)
Result: 131
=NETWORKDAYS(B6,C6,A2:A6)
Result: -4766
