Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Office 365. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Calculating Weekend Dates.
Reuben needs to know, for any given date, when the next weekend is. For his purposes, weekends begin on Saturday, so this basically means coming up with a way to "round up" a date (Sunday through Friday) to the next Saturday.
There are any number of ways that you can calculate the date of the next Saturday. This is made possible because dates are stored internally by Excel as numbers, and numbers can be easily manipulated. Perhaps the easiest way to calculate the next Saturday is this formula:
=A1+7-WEEKDAY(A1)
You can also use a very simple application of the CEILING function, as shown here:
=CEILING(A1,7)
Remember that when you use a formulaic approach, Excel may not automatically format the result to look like a date. That's easy enough to fix; just apply the cell formatting you want.
These two formulas will return the date of the next Saturday, unless the date in A1 is already a Saturday. If you want a starting date of Saturday to return the date of the following Saturday, then this formula will work just fine:
= IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=7,7,7-WEEKDAY(A1))+A1
An alternate formula (that doesn't use the IF statement) to calculate the next Saturday if the starting date in A1 is already a Saturday is:
=(A1+7+1)-WEEKDAY(A1+1)
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (9305) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Office 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Calculating Weekend Dates.
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2018-03-08 10:25:52
Gary
@Willy
I recognize I could have combined the "7+1" and removed the parenthesis, but left as I did to show the "+1" added to the 2 'parts' of the formula:
1) the calculation of the next weeks date;
2) subtracting the day of week
I like my formulas to provide some structure to indicate the intent and operation for understanding when I revisit them ... sometimes years later.
Nice work with the CEILING function, I did not review it because I rarely use CEILING.
2018-03-08 07:43:18
Willy Vanhaelen
Here is an even shorter version:
=CEILING(A1+1,7)
does the same job as this tip's
=IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=7,7,7-WEEKDAY(A1))+A1
2018-03-08 06:21:52
Willy Vanhaelen
@Gary
Very clever but you can even shorten it with 4 characters. Replace (B2+7+1) with B2+8 (no need for the brackets):
=B2+8-WEEKDAY(B2+1)
2018-03-07 12:35:36
Gary
An alternate formula (without using the IF statement) to calculate the next Saturday is
=(B2+7+1)-WEEKDAY(B2+1)
This works for all days, with no Saturday checking required.
It is based on the first presented formula but 'skips' past the WEEKDAY 7 to 0 'boundary' condition that causes the problem.
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Office 365. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: 
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