Count the business days a support ticket was open, with a holiday excluded
NETWORKDAYS counts weekdays between two dates on its own, and takes a third argument — a date, or a range of them — to pull out a holiday that would otherwise still count.
Task:
You track turnaround for a small software company's support desk. For each ticket, work out how many business days it was open between the date it was opened and the date it was resolved — weekends don't count, and neither does the company holiday noted in F2, even where it falls on a weekday. Fill in D2, D3 and D4.
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 | E | F | G | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ticket | Opened | Resolved | Business Days | Holiday | ||
| 2 | T-201 | 9/1/2026 | 9/9/2026 | 9/7/2026 | |||
| 3 | T-202 | 9/14/2026 | 9/18/2026 | ||||
| 4 | T-203 | 9/21/2026 | 9/25/2026 |
What this exercise teachesMay contain the answer
NETWORKDAYS already knows to skip Saturdays and Sundays between the two dates it's given; the third argument is what lets it skip a specific date too, whether or not that date happens to be a weekend. T-201 ran from a Tuesday to the following Wednesday — nine calendar days spanning one weekend, which would count as 7 working days on its own — but the 7th was Labor Day, so naming it in the third argument pulls the total down to 6. T-202 and T-203 never touch F2's date at all, so the same formula returns their plain five-weekday span unchanged: the holiday only ever matters when it actually falls inside the range being counted, which is exactly what a shared holiday reference should do.