Microsoft Excel Tutorial: Can Excel fill only the weekend dates for use in planning a co-parenting schedule for the year?

Welcome to the MrExcel netcast, where we bring you the best tips and tricks for mastering Excel. In this episode, we will be discussing how to fill weekend dates or every other Wednesday in Excel. As we enter the Spring season, the seminar season is also in full bloom. I recently had the pleasure of speaking to a great crowd of 85 people in Knoxville, Tennessee. If you happen to be near Columbus, Bloomington, Indianapolis, or Sarasota, I highly recommend checking out our seminars. You can find the link in the description below.

During one of my seminars, I showed the audience a cool trick where you can use Ctrl+; to insert the current date and then format it as a long date. I then demonstrated how to use the fill handle to quickly fill in the weekdays. However, one attendee came up to me and asked, "What about filling weekends?" They were trying to plan a co-parenting schedule and needed to include weekends in their spreadsheet. This is where the =WORKDAY function comes in handy. By specifying a start date and excluding any holidays, you can use this formula to generate a list of all the workdays, Monday through Friday.

But what about countries where the weekend isn't Saturday and Sunday? That's where the =WORKDAY.INTL function comes in. This international version allows you to specify which days should be considered as weekends. However, the drop-down menu for this function doesn't tell the whole story. There is a secret syntax that you can use to specify the weekend days. It involves using a 7-digit binary string, where 1 represents "don't include this day" and 0 represents "include this day". It may seem a bit backwards at first, but once you understand the logic behind it, it becomes a powerful tool for filling in weekend dates.

This trick may not be something you would stumble upon by accident, but it's definitely worth knowing. And that's why I'm here, to share these hidden gems with you. If you want to learn more tips and tricks like this, be sure to check out my book, "MrExcel XL: The 40 Greatest Tips of All Time". Thank you for watching this video and don't forget to subscribe to our channel for more Excel tutorials. See you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.

Buy Bill Jelen's latest Excel book: https://www.mrexcel.com/products/latest/

You can help my channel by clicking Like or commenting below: https://www.mrexcel.com/like-mrexcel-...

#excel
#microsoft
#microsoftexcel
#exceltips
#excelhacks
#excelformulasandfunctions
#exceldates
#excelfillhandle

This video answers these common search terms:
how to check if a date is a weekend in excel
excel fill weekend dates
populate excel with weekend dates
weekend date auto-fill in excel
filling date ranges for weekends in excel
create a list of weekend dates in excel
weekend date sequence in excel
excel formula to generate weekend dates
excel co-parenting schedule

Table of Contents:
(00:00) Excel Fill Weekend Dates
(00:25) Using Ctrl+; to insert current date and format as long date
(00:36) Fill handle can easily fill weekdays
(00:54) Filling weekends using the WORKDAY function
(01:41) Using WORKDAY.INTL for international weekend schedules
(02:14) The secret syntax for specifying weekends in WORKDAY.INTL
(03:15) Another use for Excel: planning co-parenting schedules
(03:41) Recap of the episode's tips
(04:00) Clicking Like really helps the algorithm

Right-click the fill handle and drag to Fill Weekdays
But there is no similar option to fill weekends.
This could be useful for planning co-parenting schedules
Use a secret form of WorkDay.Intl
7-digit binary string specifies which days should appear on the schedule.
Left to right, the digits represent Monday through Sunday
1 means don't count this day. 0 means do include this day (backwards!?)

Join the MrExcel Message Board discussion about this video at https://www.mrexcel.com/board/threads...