Excel Day of Week from Date

What this does

WEEKDAY takes a date and returns which day of the week it falls on, as a NUMBER from 1 to 7 rather than a name. The optional return_type decides where the week starts: the default 1 runs Sunday(1) to Saturday(7), while 2 — the common ISO choice — runs Monday(1) to Sunday(7), and 3 runs Monday(0) to Sunday(6). Because it gives a number, WEEKDAY is built for logic: flagging weekends, filtering by day, or feeding an IF. If you want the day NAME instead, use TEXT(date, "dddd") rather than WEEKDAY. Most people learn this as a sequence of clicks and forget it by next week; learning it as a pattern instead is what lets you apply it to the next, slightly different version of the problem without starting from scratch. That is the difference this page is trying to make. The difference between a quick fix and a sheet you can trust is the extra minute you spend validating “excel day of week from date”. Start on a copy or a tiny sample, keep the affected cells visible, and compare the result with the tool above before you touch the real workbook. When a formula is involved, keep the inputs labelled beside it, reference cells instead of typing values, and apply number formatting only after the result checks out. The point is a workflow that saves repeating the same clicks every week, but the practical win is that someone else can open the file and understand what happened without asking you.

A worked example

Cell A2 holds the date 2026-06-03 (a Wednesday). =WEEKDAY(A2, 2) returns 3, because with return_type 2 Monday is 1, Tuesday 2 and Wednesday 3. With the default, =WEEKDAY(A2) returns 4, since Sunday is 1 there. To flag weekends regardless of locale: =IF(WEEKDAY(A2, 2) > 5, "Weekend", "Weekday"). For the day name itself, =TEXT(A2, "dddd") returns "Wednesday". WEEKDAY is the building block for any logic that depends on the day of the week — weekend flags, shift schedules and day-based filters — because a plain number is easy to compare and feed into other formulas. If there is any chance you will reuse this, drop it into a small template tab right now: a labelled input area on the left and the formula beside it, checked once against the tool above. Next time the same question comes up, the answer is a single paste away instead of a rebuild from memory.

In Google Sheets

Google Sheets handles this almost identically to Excel. The formula syntax above is the same, and the menu lives under a slightly different label rather than a ribbon tab. Use the platform toggle at the top of the page to switch every keyboard shortcut between Windows and Mac, and expect at most cosmetic differences in naming. Keep this page bookmarked for the next time the same question comes up. Better still, rebuild the example once in your own sheet — doing it yourself, with the tool above to check against, is what turns a copied formula into a technique you own. The short version of “excel day of week from date”: the answer is at the top of this page, the tool proves it on your own numbers, and the sections above explain why it holds so the next variation does not stump you. Excel rewards people who reference cells instead of typing values and who keep inputs separate from formulas, because that is what makes a result you can audit months later. Build it once, deliberately, with the live tool as a check, and you convert a one-off lookup into a reusable skill — which is the whole point of learning the why and not just the what.

Common mistakes

• Expecting a day name — WEEKDAY returns a number; use TEXT(date, "dddd") when you want the word.
• Forgetting the return_type and assuming Monday is 1 — with the default, Sunday is 1 and Monday is 2, which shifts every weekend test.
• Pointing WEEKDAY at text that looks like a date but is not a real date value, which gives a #VALUE! error; convert it with DATEVALUE first.

Frequently asked questions