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.
Interactive Spreadsheet
Hints
+5 XPno-hints bonusSolve it on your own to keep the bonus. Each hint gets one step closer to the formula.
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 teachesMay contain 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.