Returning BCWC Dates: Handling Mondays and Fridays in Excel
When working with dates in Excel, you may encounter situations where you need to determine the start week based on a specific day, but not all cases follow the start day. This article will focus on how to handle Mondays and Fridays when returning BCWC (beginning of week compensation) dates in Excel.
Calculating the Start Week Based on a Specific Day
To calculate the start week based on a specific day, such as Monday or Friday, you can use the WEEKDAY function in Excel. The WEEKDAY function returns a number that represents the day of the week, with Sunday being 1 and Saturday being 7.
=WEEKDAY(date, type)
date: the date you want to find the day of the week for
type: a number that determines the day of the week that the week begins on (1 = Sunday, 2 = Monday, etc.)
For example, if you want to find out if a date is a Monday, you can use the following formula:
=WEEKDAY(A1, 2) = 1
A1: the cell containing the date you want to check
Handling Mondays and Fridays
If you need to handle Mondays and Fridays differently, you can use the IF function in combination with the WEEKDAY function. For example, if you want to return the date of the previous Monday if the date is a Friday, you can use the following formula:
=IF(WEEKDAY(A1, 2) = 6, A1 - 3, A1 - WEEKDAY(A1, 2) + 2)
A1: the cell containing the date you want to check
type: a number that determines the day of the week that the week begins on (1 = Sunday, 2 = Monday, etc.)
This formula checks if the date is a Friday (WEEKDAY(A1, 2) = 6) and returns the date minus 3 days if it is. If the date is not a Friday, it returns the date minus the WEEKDAY function, which returns the day of the week as a number, plus 2 to get to Monday.
Excel provides several functions that make it easy to handle Mondays and Fridays when returning BCWC dates. By using the WEEKDAY function in combination with the IF function, you can create formulas that return the correct date based on the day of the week.
References
- ExcelJet (n.d.) WEEKDAY function. Retrieved from https://exceljet.net/excel-functions/excel-weekday-function
- Microsoft (n.d.) IF function. Retrieved from https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/if-function-69aed7c9-4e8a-4752-a7c9-4617a2f7e7de