Determining the Name of the Day of the Week

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated January 2, 2014)

You probably already know that you can use the WEEKDAY function to return a numeric representation of the day of the week. For instance, the following returns the weekday number for whatever date is in cell A7:

=weekday(A7)

The numeric value can be helpful, but what you really might want is to have a name for the day of the week, such as Monday, Tuesday, etc. In this case you need to use the TEXT function to find out the answer:

=text(A7, "dddd")

The TEXT function returns a text string that is formatted according to whatever you specify in the second parameter. In this case the parameter is "dddd", which means "give me the full weekday." Provided the value in cell A7 is a real date, the function returns the desired name of the day of the week for that date.

You can get different variations of the day of the week by changing the format string used with the TEXT function. For instance, if you wanted only the three-letter day of the week, you could use the following:

=text(A7, "ddd")

This returns Mon, Tue, Wed, etc. If you make the format string even shorter (such as "d" or "dd") you no longer get days of the week, but instead get numeric days of the month.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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