Converting A Date in Excel To Week, Bi-Week, Month, and More Tim Wilson at Web A

Converting a Date in Excel to Week, Bi-Week, Month, and More TimWilson at Web Analytics Demystified
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Converting a Date in Excel to Week, Bi-Week, Month, and More
Published by Tim Wilson on J anuary 15, 2013
I often find myself getting data out of one system or another (or multiple systems, and then combining them) as daily data a series of
metrics by day for a sequence of days. Sometimes, I work with that data at a daily level, but, often, I want to roll the data up by week, by
month, or by some other time period.
For instance, if I want to look at the data weekly, Ill use either the last day of the week or the first day of the week and then use a formula
in a new column to convert each actual day to the week in which it falls:
Excel Date Conversion
In the example above, 1/15/2013 is a Tuesday that falls in a week that ends on Saturday, 1/19/2013. The same holds true for Wednesday
(1/16), Thursday (1/17), Friday (1/18), and Saturday (1/19). As soon as get to 1/20/2013 (Sunday), Im in a new week a week that ends
on 1/26/2013. Make sense?
By adding this column, I can create a pivot table that can easily generate weekly data for whatever metrics are in the spreadsheet.
This approach works for a number of different ways you might need to roll up daily data, so I thought a post that walks through some of
the more common ones and the formula to carry out each conversion was in order. Ive put all of the examples in this post in
a downloadable spreadsheet that you can check out and play around with.
Day of Week
The WEEKDAY() function returns a number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7. But, what if you actually want the day of the week in plain English?
Excel Dates: Weekdays
You can use the CHOOSE() function and hard code values. Or, you can make a separate table that maps a number to each weekday and
use VLOOKUP to populate the values. Im not going to discuss either of those approachesbecause my preferred approach is to use the
TEXT() function.
For the fully written out weekday ($A3 is the cell with 1/15/2013 in it you would just drag this formula down, or, if youre using an
Excel Table, it would autofill):
=TEXT($A3,dddd)
For the 3-letter weekday:
=TEXT($A3,ddd)
Easy-peasy, no?
Note: If you simply want the date to be displayed as the weekday, you dont need a formula at all you can simply change the cell
formatting to a custom format of dddd (for the full weekday) or ddd (for the 3-letter weekday). If you do that, the display of the data
will be as a weekday, but the underlying value will still be the actual date. This formula actually makes the value the weekday. Depending
on what your needs are, one approach or the other will make more sense.
Convert to Week Of
The example I started this post with is converting each day to be the day that ends the week or the day that starts the week. To do this, you
can use the WEEKDAY() function. The easiest way to understand how this works out is to write out (or put in Excel) a series of dates and
then write the numbers 1 through 7 as you go down the dates. The farther you go into a week, the bigger the WEEKDAY() value is. So, if
you subtract the WEEKDAY() value from the actual date, you will get the same value 7 days in a row, at which point the value will
jump seven days. Make sense (its confusinguntil its not)?
So, to convert a date to be the Saturday of the week the date falls in, use this formula (the +7 just keeps the converted value from being
the Saturday of the previous week):
=$A3-WEEKDAY($A3)+7
Its the same idea if you wanted to use the first day of the week, with the week defined as starting on Sunday:
=$A3-WEEKDAY($A3)+1
Obviously, you can use this basic formula for whatever week criteria you want. You just have to either think about it really hardor
experiment until its doing what you want.
Convert to Bi-Weekly Date
Sometimes, a company operates on a bi-weekly cycle in some ways. For instance, a lot of companies pay their employees every two
weeks. WEEKDAY() doesnt work for this, because it doesnt tell you which of the two weeks a day falls into.
In this case, I use MOD(). This function is, basically, a remainder function, and its main use is to calculate the remainder when one
number is divided by another (for instance, =MOD(14,4) returns 2 because, when you divide 14 by 4, you get a remainder of 2).
Well, Excel dates are, under the hood, just numbers. You dont really need to know exactly what number a date is (although you can
change the cell formatting to Number when a date is displayed and you will see the number). But, if you think about it, if you divide a
date by 14, its going to have a remainder between 1 and 13. Lets say the remainder is 2. So, what will the remainder be if you divide
the next day by 14? It will be 3. And so on until you get to 13, at which point the next day, if divided by 14, will have a remainder of 0.
Hmmm. This seems like weve recreated the WEEKDAY() function used abovebut with a 14-day long period instead of 7-day one,
right? Exactly!
So, if we wanted to convert a date to be the Saturday at the end of the bi-week period, it would be one of these two formulas (depending on
which Saturday is the cutoff and which is the mid-period point):
=$A3-MOD($A3-1,14)+13
or
=$A3-MOD($A3-8,14)+13
If you wanted to use the start of the period, with the week starting on Sunday, then it would be one of these two formulas:
=$A3-MOD($A3-1,14)
or
=$A3-MOD($A3-8,14)
Again, it takes some experimentation if you want to adjust to other dates, but the 14 will not change as long as youre working on bi-
weekly periods.
Convert to Bi-Monthly Date
Sometimes (again, company pay periods are a good example), rather than using a bi-weekly calendar, you want to use a bi-monthly
calendar every date from the 1st through the 14th should be converted to the first day of the month, and every day from the 15th
through the end of the month should be coded as the 15th. To do this, we use the DATE() function with an IF() statement for the day
value:
=DATE(YEAR($A3),MONTH($A3),IF(DAY($A3)<15,1,15))
We know the year is the YEAR() of the date being converted, and we know the month is the MONTH() of the date being converted. But,
we need to look at the day of the month and check if it is less than 15. If it is, then we return a day value of 1, and, otherwise, we return
a day value of 15.
Convert to Monthly Date
Monthly is almost as common, if not moreso, than weekly. To convert to the first day of the month is a straightforward use of the DATE()
function. We pull the year using the YEAR() function on the date were converting, the month using the MONTH() function on the date
were converting, and then simply hard code the day as 1:
=DATE(YEAR($A3),MONTH($A3),1)
But, what if we want to use the last day of the month? We cant hard code the day value because that day could be 28, 29 (leap year), 30,
or 31. Curse you, Gregorian calendar!!!
Well, actually, this isnt all that complicated, either. Why? Because the last day of the month is always the day before the first day of the
next month. Huh? Thats right. Thats how we get the last day of the month: we use the DATE() function to figure out the first day of
the next month (by adding 1 to the MONTH() value) and then subtract 1:
=DATE(YEAR($A3),MONTH($A3)+1,1)-1
How do you like them apples?! [idiom ref.]
As an interesting aside, it would be understandable if this formula broke for the month of December. In that case, youre actually telling
Excel to calculate a date where the month is 13. Luckily, Excel figures out what you mean and winds up returning J anuary 1 of the
following year (from which the formula then subtracts one to return December 31st).
But, What About
Ive just scratched the surface with possible date conversions in this post. Hopefully, the different approaches I described will trigger an
idea or two for your specific situation. But, if youve got one that is stumping you, leave a comment here and Ill take a crack at it!
And, all of the examples here are included in this downloadable spreadsheet. You can change the start date in cell A3 and all of the
subsequent dates will automatically update. Happy date converting!
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