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 a Date Five Days before the First Business Day.

Calculating a Date Five Days before the First Business Day

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated December 1, 2018)
This tip applies to Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003


DeWayne has a date in cell A1, and it is easy to extract the month from that date. What he needs to do, however, is to calculate the date that is five calendar days before the first business day of the month. Thus, if the date in cell A1 is September 26, 2012, then the first business day of the month would be September 3 and five days before that would be August 29.

There are many different formulas you can use to derive such a date. The shortest one that I've come across is this one:

=WORKDAY(A1-DAY(A1),1)-5

It subtracts the day of the month from the current date, which gives the last day of the previous month. Using this as a parameter for the WORKDAY function, along with a second parameter of 1, gives you the first workday (business day) of the current month. Five days is then subtracted from this date, giving the desired result.

You could also, if you prefer, use the EOMONTH function within the formula, in this manner:

=WORKDAY(EOMONTH(A1,-1),1)-5

The EOMONTH(A1,-1) portion of the formula gives the same result as A1-DAY(A1), which is the last day of the previous month.

You could also use the third parameter of the WORKDAY function to take holidays into account, if you desire. The easiest way to do this is in this manner:

=WORKDAY(A1-DAY(A1),1,MyHolidays)-5

In this usage, MyHolidays is a name you assign to a range of cells, where each cell contains the date of a holiday during the year.

It should be noted that the two functions used so far (WORKDAY and EOMONTH) are both part of the Analysis ToolPak, which must be installed and enabled on your system in order for the functions to work. (How you enable the ToolPak is covered in other issues of ExcelTips.)

If you don't want to use the Analysis ToolPak for some reason, you can use a different formulaic approach, such as the following:

=A1-DAY(A1)+1+(WEEKDAY(A1-DAY(A1))=7)+2*(WEEKDAY(A1-DAY(A1))=6)-5

The formula calculates the first day of the month and then adds appropriate values based on whether the first day of the month is a Saturday or Sunday. Then, five days are subtracted from the result.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (12178) 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 a Date Five Days before the First Business Day.

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. ...

MORE FROM ALLEN

Preventing Changes to Formatting and Page Size

When you create workbooks for others to use, you might want to make sure that they can't change the formatting and paper ...

Discover More

Copying Conditional Formatting

Conditional formatting is a great feature in Excel. Here's how you can copy conditional formats from one cell to another ...

Discover More

Margins for All Documents Changing

Have you had the margins in a group of documents change without you knowingly doing anything? This tip explores some ...

Discover More

Excel Smarts for Beginners! Featuring the friendly and trusted For Dummies style, this popular guide shows beginners how to get up and running with Excel while also helping more experienced users get comfortable with the newest features. Check out Excel 2013 For Dummies today!

More ExcelTips (menu)

Calculating Weekend Dates

Do you look forward to the weekend? Well, you can use Excel to let you know when the next weekend begins. Here's how you ...

Discover More

Incrementing Months in Dates

Excel can easily store dates. If you want to increment a date by one month, there are a number of ways you can accomplish ...

Discover More

Calculating an Age On a Given Date

Start putting dates in a worksheet (especially birthdates), and sooner or later you will need to calculate an age based ...

Discover More
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

View most recent newsletter.

Comments

If you would like to add an image to your comment (not an avatar, but an image to help in making the point of your comment), include the characters [{fig}] (all 7 characters, in the sequence shown) in your comment text. You’ll be prompted to upload your image when you submit the comment. Maximum image size is 6Mpixels. Images larger than 600px wide or 1000px tall will be reduced. Up to three images may be included in a comment. All images are subject to review. Commenting privileges may be curtailed if inappropriate images are posted.

What is one minus 0?

There are currently no comments for this tip. (Be the first to leave your comment—just use the simple form above!)


This Site

Got a version of Excel that uses the menu interface (Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, or Excel 2003)? This site is for you! If you use a later version of Excel, visit our ExcelTips site focusing on the ribbon interface.

Newest Tips
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

(Your e-mail address is not shared with anyone, ever.)

View the most recent newsletter.