Quickly get the name of the day from a date
So you have a list of dates but for analysis purposes you need to be able to show the days of the week as another column. Of course you could spend many happy hours locating a calendar on Google and manually extracting them but I suspect if you are reading this….you probably are looking for a faster, cleaner way. Let me introduce you to the power of the Text function. In this blog post I’m going to show you how to use it to extract the days from a date column but you could also use it to extract the month, the year, the day as well. You can find full details of the syntax by searching Excel help (“text function”).
The syntax I am going to use in this one is =text(cell reference, “ddddd”). This gives me the full spelling of the day i.e. Tuesday rather than Tues. If you want to try this yourself you can quickly generate the dates by typing in the first one and then use the mouse to copy down. Excel will automatically increment the days for you.
So in the video below I’m going to show you how to do this…
[fvplayer src=’https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/the-excel-expert/text_function.mp4′]
Some useful products
I’m going to be recommending some good value Excel products here. Please note that (a) these are ones I use myself and (b) I do earn a small affiliate fee – but I probably won’t be heading to the Cayman islands on their proceeds……:-)