Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: Calculating Weekend Dates.

Calculating Weekend Dates

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated September 30, 2023)
This tip applies to Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003


Reuben needs to know, for any given date, when the next weekend is. For his purposes, weekends begin on Saturday, so this basically means coming up with a way to "round up" a date (Sunday through Friday) to the next Saturday.

There are any number of ways that you can calculate the date of the next Saturday. This is made possible because dates are stored internally by Excel as numbers, and numbers can be easily manipulated. Perhaps the easiest way to calculate the next Saturday is this formula:

=A1+7-WEEKDAY(A1)

You can also use a very simple application of the CEILING function, as shown here:

=CEILING(A1,7)

These two formulas will return the date of the next Saturday, unless the date in A1 is already a Saturday. If you want a starting date of Saturday to return the date of the following Saturday, then this formula will work just fine:

= IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=7,7,7-WEEKDAY(A1))+A1

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (9303) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Calculating Weekend Dates.

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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