Hopefully all of this wasn’t too confusing – it’s a hard formula to decipher, but as with all formulas, the best approach is to break it into chunks, determine what each chunk does independently, then merge them all back together and run through the entire thing with a series of test data.

In the next part of this series, we’ll be wrapping things up with a quick revisit to our (now more understandable) formula, and summary.

Probably the best approach to really be able to see just what’s going on is to plug in a few test dates and run through the calculations, which is what we’ll begin with next time.

I wanted to start off the series on the “Date and Time” set of functions by examining a specific problem that many folks have posted questions about – that is, how do you calculate the difference (number of days) between two dates, while excluding weekends? (Iain on the STP forums asked this recently, which sparked my interest in writing this)