I often want to know what day of the week a date is. Excel has a function for this, but unfortunately it only returns an integer, for example the function:

=WEEKDAY("01/02/2009")

returns 1 (which represents Sunday).

The TEXT() function

The easiest way to do this is via the TEXT() function, which you pass the date you want to show the weekday of, and a text code representing how you want it displayed. If the date is in cell A1, some possibilities are:

• =TEXT(A1, "ddd") - which will show the date as Sat, Sun, Mon, etc
• =TEXT(A1, "dddd") - will show the date as Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and so on.
• Other options are available, including "mmm" for month names (and the TEXT() function is handy for formatting things other than dates) - see the TEXT() function help page for more info.

VBA Script

If the TEXT() function isn’t flexible enough, you can use write a VBA User Defined Function to display it in the way you want. We’ve included an example below.

The function (possibly not the most elegant implementation possible) is:

' function to return a text representation of the weekday of a given date
' returns the full text, which can be shortened by left(), etc
Function dayText(d As Date) As String
   If Weekday(d) = 1 Then dayText = "Sunday"
   If Weekday(d) = 2 Then dayText = "Monday"
   If Weekday(d) = 3 Then dayText = "Tuesday"
   If Weekday(d) = 4 Then dayText = "Wednesday"
   If Weekday(d) = 5 Then dayText = "Thursday"
   If Weekday(d) = 6 Then dayText = "Friday"
   If Weekday(d) = 7 Then dayText = "Saturday"
End Function

Enter this via the VBA Editor - press Alt + F11, then Insert -> Module and paste this code in. You may wish to add in validation, such as ensuring it can properly handle bad data, such as blank cells or inputs which are not dates.

It can then be called by:

=DAYTEXT("01/02/2009")

which returns Sunday.

This can then be shortened to one or three letters via the left() function, for example:

=LEFT(DAYTEXT("01/02/2009"),3)

returns Sun.

Nexted IF()

If you want to avoid macros, an alternative method is to use the (slightly messy) formula consisting of nested IF(), for a spreadsheet with a date in cell A1:

=IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=1, "Sunday", IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=2,"Monday",IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=3, "Tuesday", IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=4, "Wednesday", IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=5, "Thursday", IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=6, "Friday", "Saturday"))))))

This returns the same as the VBA script above.