Excel date and forumula problems

[Robbeh]

Hello,

I'm having two problems with Excel, it's quite hard to explain as I can't show you the file - but here goes!

In field E4 I have a date (ie 20/01/2004) , and in D4 I have a number of days (ie 2).

The date is a deadline for a task, and the number of days is how long it's going to complete that task - so, in cell F4, I'm trying to calculate when we need to start the task (ie E4-D4). The problem with that is that it doesn't take into account weekends - so to get to my problem, is there a way of making it take into account weekends, and change my value of F4 to include them (so it'll move the start task date forward).

Secondly - is there a way to make it so that if there is no value in D4 (ie we havent said how long something is going to take) it doesnt calculate the figure (I guess there's some kind of if test?). I've tried to do this using conditional formatting, but this is no good because although it can hide data by making it the same colour as the background the data shows up when I create a pivot table from the data.

I would really appreciate any help that anyone could give me, thank you very much indeed for your time

 

[Aladin Akyurek]

=WORKDAY(E4,-D4,Holidays)

where Holidays refers to a range housing the holiday dates.

 

[DonkeyOte]

=IF(D4="","",WORKDAY(E4,-(D4),Holidays))

The great man got there first

 

[Robbeh]

Hello,

Thank you for your input.
I'm afraid I don't quite understand - could you go in baby steps please!

I've managed to define a range of dates which house all the weekends and bank holidays for this year and called it 'Holidays', but when I put in that formula I get an error.

Thank you so much once again for your help!

 

[Aladin Akyurek]

Hello,

Thank you for your input.
I'm afraid I don't quite understand - could you go in baby steps please!

I've managed to define a range of dates which house all the weekends and bank holidays for this year and called it 'Holidays', but when I put in that formula I get an error.

Thank you so much once again for your help!

Holidays should only list the bank holiday dates, not the weekends, because WORKDAY automatically takes care of weekend dates.

 

[Robbeh]

Wow that's clever of it!

I'm sorry, I'm probably being very stupid, but I get an error that says "Invalid name error", the value displayed in the cell is #NAME?

Is that because I've done something stupid!

Again guys, I can't thank you enough, you're really getting me out of a hole!

 

[Robbeh]

I'm sorry, I didnt have a necessary bit of excel installed.
You guys got it right - thank you so much, my pivot table now works fantastically!!

Thank you once again, I owe you all one.