Google Apps Hacks

68 GOOGLE APPS HACKS

HaCK 24:



To get from a date value to the actual name of the day—inspired

by the hack “Return the Weekday of a Date” from David and Raina

Hawley’s Excel Hacks, 2nd Edition—you need to press a couple of

different functions into service.

Among Google Spreadsheet’s functions are a few that let you get the name of the day or month

for a given date value. Take a look at the sample spreadsheet with user registration dates shown in

Figure 3-20. To the left side, you can see a list of usernames; next to them, you can see the date on

which each user registered for the service. Dates are easy enough to get into a spreadsheet, but

to get the spreadsheet to print out the weekday in every row, you’ll need to use some functions.

The functions you need to pick the weekday are called WEEKDAY and CHOOSE. The WEEKDAY

function returns a number from 1 to 7, where 1 is Sunday, 2 is Monday, 3 is Tuesday and so on.

Wondering how to calculate the number of days the user has been registered so far? Check out  for

complete details.

Try it out yourself by entering the following into any cell:

=WEEKDAY(B2)

This formula shows that April 21, 2004 (the value in B2), is a “4”, which means Wednesday. (A

quick jump over to Google Calendar at http://calendar.google.com veries this.) But that isn’t very

readable—you still need to convert this number ...