Excel Get 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. For “excel get day of week from date”, the reliable version is a short checking loop, not just the first command that appears to work. Run it on a deliberately small range first, watch how the affected cells change, and only then apply the same setup to the full sheet. 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. That is what makes a workflow that saves repeating the same clicks every week useful in real work: repeatable, auditable, and not dependent on memory or luck.

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. A practical tip before you scale it up: build it once on a small block of test data, confirm the number against the tool on this page, and only then point it at your real sheet. That one habit catches almost every mistake while it is still cheap to fix, long before a wrong figure reaches a report or a colleague.

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. Nothing on this page is behind a login: the tool runs entirely in your browser, the formula is shown in full with one-click copy, and the steps work the same on Windows and Mac. That is the whole promise here — the exact answer, a way to prove it on your own numbers, and just enough context to make it stick. Treat “excel get day of week from date” as a small building block rather than a chore. Once the inputs sit in their own cells and the formula reads from them, the same setup answers a dozen related questions with a tweak, and Excel keeps every dependent figure current as the data changes. The tool above is there so you can rehearse and verify before committing anything to a real workbook; the steps and worked example are there so the logic sticks. Get it right once and it stops costing you time — it starts saving it, every time the question comes back around.

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