Set contract review deadlines from a rush flag
WORKDAY skips weekends on its own — feed it the day count an IF picks and it lands on the right business day without a calendar in hand.
Task:
You coordinate contract intake for a corporate legal team. Every contract that comes in gets logged with the date it arrived and whether it's marked Rush. Standard contracts are due back within 5 business days of arrival; Rush contracts within 1. Work out the review due date for each contract in column D.
Learning Objectives:
- Nest an IF inside another function's argument instead of computing it in a helper column first
- Add business days to a date with WORKDAY, without counting weekends by hand
- Feed a function a value chosen by a condition, rather than a hardcoded number
Solve without hints for +5 XP
Interactive Spreadsheet
The data in this exercise
This is the grid you start with. Cell references in the task — B6, C2 — point at the row numbers and column letters below.
| A | B | C | D | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Contract | Date Received | Rush | Due Date |
| 2 | Vendor MSA — Alden Supply | 8/14/2026 | No | |
| 3 | NDA — Brightline Foods | 8/17/2026 | Yes | |
| 4 | Lease Renewal — Kessler Property Group | 8/19/2026 | No | |
| 5 | Service Agreement — Torrance Logistics | 8/20/2026 | Yes | |
| 6 | Amendment — Vale Robotics | 8/21/2026 | No |
What this exercise teaches (contains the answer)
WORKDAY(B2,IF(C2="Yes",1,5)) works because WORKDAY's second argument is just a number, and IF is free to be the thing that produces it — nothing requires the day count to be typed in literally rather than computed. That's what lets one formula cover both SLAs instead of needing a helper column that picks 1 or 5 before WORKDAY ever runs. The weekend-skipping is what makes WORKDAY the right function to reach for at all: Alden's contract arrives on Friday the 14th, and 5 business days lands the deadline on Friday the 21st, not the following Wednesday a calendar-day count would give — the intervening weekend never gets counted. Vale's contract shows the same thing from a different angle: it arrives on a Friday too, and adding 5 business days pushes the due date all the way to the following Friday, because both weekends in between get stepped over.