I'm going to toss a couple of questions at you before going further.

#1 - define "standard holiday". For what country (USA, I presume, but it's
a world-wide community here)? There are currently 10 recognized U.S. Federal
holidays, and then there are a variety of State holidays - thus my request to
define "standard holiday".

#2 - Do you want the actual date of the holiday or the day it is observed
on? For the Federal holidays in the U.S. the rule is if the holiday falls on
a Saturday, it is observed on the Friday before; if it falls on a Sunday,
then it is observed on the Monday after.

Remember unless you go look them up somewhere, some of the holidays fall on
different dates each year - Thanksgiving in the U.S. being one of those. The
actual day of some like that one is determined as some day of the week after
some other point in time.

#3 - looking for religious holidays also? Some of those are fun. Easter is
fun to compute.

"dribler2" wrote:

i'm short for long formulas, can anyone help me with this.

assuming i have a 20 dates in text format (e.g. "25 DEC", "01 JAN", "01
MAY", etc..) in column X which contains the standard public holidays.
(x1:x20). i made it to 20 yet some cells are blank for any future additions)

and in column A, i have a series of dates for say 6 years, starting from
01/01/2006 down to 12/31/2012

Then, I need to collect the real dates of standard public holidays in column
A (e.g. 01/01/2006,01/01/2007,etc) and place them all in Column C, under a
defined name "holidays"..

surely someone knew this a since long time ago.

any suggestion is welcome.

driller