Creating a series of weekday only dates

As is often the case, I get the most interesting questions from participants. This week I got asked how to create a series of weekdays only. In the class I tried my usual technique of giving Excel a pattern of 10 dates following this pattern but it didn’t act as expected. One of those “unexpected items in bagging area” effects. So of course once the class was over , I had to go and experiment. The first thing I realised is that of course I should have used the Fill Series option to generate a set of weekdays. This is what I did in Method 1.

If you are new to Excel – this is probably easier and then maybe manually edit for public holidays.  I have a list of the public holidays in Ireland on the Method 2 tab in the file.

But then I found myself thinking – what about public holidays and that required a second method – using the workday() function. I used ChatGPT to help generate the formula and then tweaked it a bit.

Here is the completed file.

In the video I referenced the Text function to show the dates and the Workday and Sequence function.

Here is the video.