Thank you all. This has been very educational. I have a few comments.

Probably the reason 21/4/2008 doesn't work for you is because your regional
settings aren't set-up as d/m/y, BUT as m/d/y.

Good point, RD.

I'm cocatenating the result and that returns a value of 38969 instead of September.

If I key 9/9/2006 into A1, what formula do I use in A2 to get 38969. Please advise.

=C1&" "&TEXT(A2,"mmmm")

If I key 9/9/2006 into A1, I think I can reference A1 directly in the above formula, instead of entering =A1 in A2 and then using A2 in the above formula.

The argument: 2/14/2008 is the equivalent of: 2 divided by 14 divided by 2008 which equals: 0.0000711439954467843........Weekday( 0 ) is actually 12/31/1899 which is a Saturday or weekday 7 when the return_type used is 1 or omitted.

Don't think I want to agree with this. I key in =WEEKDAY(0) into a cell, I get 7-Jan-00. Don't know why and not sure if we are talking about the same thing.

=MONTH(0) yields 1-Jan-1900. In both cases, we never got back to 1899.

=WEEKDAY(--"1899/12/31") gives an error #VALUE! which makes sense as the date system starts at 1/1/1900.

Talking about 1899 makes me feel very old ;) but all this is very interesting. Please keep the date talk going.

Next I have to analyze the formula for "last workday of the current month." This formual is three-line long and uses EOMONTH(). Looks tough. If it gets too confusing, I'll just use it without understanding it. There is a shorter formula but uses "holidays" as part of the syntax. (Holidays is not a function.)

Epinn

"Bob Phillips" wrote in message ...
Hi Epinn,

The "--" is exactly the same as its usage in SUMPRODUCT, it is coercing into
a numeric.

=WEEKDAY(--"21/4/2008") gives #VALUE!
=WEEKDAYS(--"4/21/2008") gives 2.

As RD says the second version of that works for you, but fails for me is
because we have different date settings, yours are American, mine are
European.

But I prefer "/" to "-" and I tested it. I am glad that "/" works too.

The purpose of using the date in the format yyyy-mm-dd or yyyy/mm/dd is to
remove ambiguity (10/09/2006 is 9th Oct to you, it's 10th Sep to me). I
prefer the use of the "-" separator because that is part of the ISO
standard.

I find date functions may be as confusing as SUMPRODUCT().

No, you are just trying to understand properly so that you can use more
effectively. Nothing wrong with that. I answered a post on another forum
where a guy gave totally misleading information about SUMPRODUCT as if it
were gospel. It didn't affect the solution, which worked, but should the OP
have tried to take it further, he would really have gotten confused. I don't
see that happening to you.

And if you think dates are confusing, just pity us developers who work in
both markets, catering for all forms can be really challenging.

--
HTH

Bob Phillips

(replace somewhere in email address with gmail if mailing direct)