The WEEKDAY function in Excel is one of its many wonderful date and time functions. These functions are some of the most popular in Excel.

The Excel WEEKDAY function returns a number that identifies the day of the week from a given date. It has several options to specify which day is the first day of the week.

This Excel function is very useful. This tutorial will show two examples of the Excel WEEKDAY function helping us to achieve typical Excel tasks.

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Having to calculate date and time difference in Excel is a common task. Unfortunately, depending on your requirements it is also not always a simple one.

Take this example where column A contains a start date and time, and column B an end date and time. We wish to calculate the elapsed time in days, hours and minutes e.g. 11 days 4 hours 9 minutes.

There are multiple ways of calculating date and time difference in Excel. In this scenario we will need to get a little clever.

As you may well know, date and time values are stored as numbers in Excel. For example, the 05/01/2017 10:10 is stored as 42740.42.

Therefore, if I write the formula as =B2-A2, then the result is returned as 2.993056.

To return a result that makes sense to us, we will tackle the date and time parts of the cell separately.

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In this blog post we will uncover an Excel formula to count how many times a specific character appears in a cell.

The formula used in this tutorial will work for any text character, and can also be used to count the occurrences of specific words in a cell.

In this example, we used the formula to count the occurrences of the asterisk in the cells of column A.

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I was asked recently in class how to extract a postcode from an address in the UK. The person asking needed a formula because the spreadsheet updates often and they wanted an automated solution.

The problem with extracting UK postcodes is that they are highly irregular. They will be at the end of the full address and can come in a different number of characters e.g. E1 6AX, RM3 8HN and LE41 8JX.

They are not as structured as a US zip code may be and harder to extract. Because of this the formula is intense, but I am going to break it down and explain it in detail.

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