The additional, optional parameter “Weekend” distinguishes this function from WORKDAY in Excel. In the international version, you can adapt the length of the weekend, and also specify the days of the week to be treated as non-working days. Excel provides two different options for entry. You can either use a weekend number or a specific character string.
The weekend numbers are defined by Excel. Every number corresponds to a weekday or a combination of weekdays:
- 1: Saturday, Sunday
- 2: Sunday, Monday
- 3: Monday, Tuesday
- 4: Tuesday, Wednesday
- 5: Wednesday, Thursday
- 6: Thursday, Friday
- 7: Friday, Saturday
- 11: Sunday
- 12: Monday
- 13: Tuesday
- 14: Wednesday
- 15: Thursday
- 16: Friday
- 17: Saturday
If this argument is left blank, Excel automatically uses a combination of Saturday and Sunday.
On the other hand, if you use the character string, the structure is relatively simple. The character string consists of seven characters, one for each day of the week, starting with Monday. If you enter 0 as one character, the day is treated as a working day. A 1 represents a free day. 1000001 would, therefore, mean a weekend of Sunday and Monday. The advantage of this function is that you can save more than two days as regular free days. However, you cannot enter 1 for all characters. You have to enclose the character string in quotes.
If you want to calculate a deadline and your working week is from Tuesday to Saturday, there are two ways you can do so with the WORKDAY.INTL function: