AcmeCorp aim to reply to customer complaints within 3 working days. They plan to use SharePoint Reminder webpart to alert managers when these targets are not being met.
We have a list with the following information
| ID | Title | Date Received | Reply Due | Reply Sent |
| 1 | Order hasn’t arrived | Friday 7/Nov/08 | Wed 12/Nov/08 | |
| 2 | Order missing items | Monday 10/Nov/08 | Thursday 11/Nov/08 |
Once we have this table we could make a View with a filter to only show records that don’t yet have a Reply Sent date (i.e. they have not been dealt with) and then configure a Reminder web part to watch this view and send out emails when the Reply Due date is overdue.
If we didn’t care about working days we could set Reply Due to be a calculated column with a formula of
=[Date Received]+3
The question is – how do we work out the Reply Due date being 3 working days from the received date? (In AcmeCorps case a working week is Monday through Friday)
One of the calculated column functions you can use in SharePoint is Weekday which returns 1 for Sunday, 2 for Monday and through to 7 for Saturday.
So from here we can work out if the day is
| Received | Weekday | Days to add | Reply Due |
| Sunday | 1 | +4 | Thursday |
| Monday | 2 | +3 | Thursday |
| Tuesday | 3 | +3 | Friday |
| Wednesday | 4 | +5 | Monday |
| Thursday | 5 | +5 | Tuesday |
| Friday | 6 | +5 | Wednesday |
| Saturday | 7 | +5 | Thursday |
Or writing this another way
Weekday > 3 then +5
Weekday = 2 or 3 then +3
Weekday = 1 then +4
or yet another way
if weekday > 3
add 5
else if weekday > 1
add 3
else
add 4
The final ninja move we need is the IF statement
=IF(some expression, do this if true, do this if false)
and these can be nested and combined with AND/OR or even nested with other IF’s – see the documentation.
We can put this into a formula for SharePoint calculated columns like this
=IF(Weekday([Date Received])>3, [Date Received]+5,
IF(Weekday([Date Received])>1,[Date Received]+3,
[Date Received]+4))
Be very careful when entering this sort of formula, if you get the field names wrong or put a space or a bracket in the wrong place then you will see an error.
You can use the above method if your due date is 4,6,7,8,9 etc days on, just adjust the number of days you add as appropriate.
If your due dates are always a multiple of 5 (e.g. 5,10,15) working days then your job is easier as you will always have 2 weekend days involved so you can just add 7,14,21 etc using =[Field]+7
(FREE BONUS! This also works in Excel, remember to change the Date Received to the column/row reference and don’t use square brackets [] and also format the column as a Date)
But what about holidays?
Ahhh, that’s the problem with this method and there is no easy solution without some complex custom workflow code.
One thing that may work for your circumstance is to add a Reply Due column, set it to Date Time type and set the default value to a Calculated Value with the following formula
=IF(WEEKDAY(Today)>3,Today+5,IF(WEEKDAY(Today)>1,Today+3,Today+4))
This will set the Due Date as 3 working days from when the record was entered but it could be overridden manually if there are holiday days between Today and the due date.
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Tags: Calculated Columns, Reminder, SharePoint, WebPart
thank you very much. solves a few problems.
Hi, is there anyway to incoroprate the working day into this, and to add hours rather than days?
rgould – I am assuming you mean the scenario of “Reply needed in 3 working hours” so if something came in at 4pm Monday then it would be due (9 to 5 working day) by 11am Tuesday?
How would the calculated columns work to take the days between [date 1] and [date 2] and exclude the weekends? I’m trying to get the workday duration between the start date and the end date.
Mariel – Good question.
I’ve spent quite some time looking into this an unless you can make some assumptions such as Date1 and Date2 always finish on the same weekday then its just not feasable as far as I can see.
Excel has the NETWORKDAYS function and at a push you can make this work using DateDiff (NOTE the two f’s!) – but SharePoint has neither.
You could possibly do this using XSL functions similar to this, but I will have to leave this for others!
http://sharepointapplied.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/useless-calculated-column-today-trick-xsl-today-to-the-rescue/
Hi Ryan, I’ve got an issue where I need to calculate the days taken to complete a task and I used this formula:
=IF([Actual Date Completed]=0,”NA”,TEXT([Actual Date Completed]-[Start Date],”d:h:mm”))
The formula works almost perfectly….
My question is, how do I OMIT weekends if the project runs over consecutive weeks?
Also, can I OMIT times as well? I.e. We work from 8:30am-5:00pm Mon-Fri so there is no need to have times outside these enter the calculation. It’s very important that the amount of time is as accurate as possible.
I appreciate your help here!
@Pete, Did you get your answer? It’s a very valid point and I’m facing the same problem!
I am also interested in working with hours.
When a calendar event is being created, I want the end date/time to automatically populate to 1.5 hours after the start date/time. Seems simple, but haven’t found a formula for this yet.
Thanks.
@Triston
Check out this blog post :-
http://blog.pentalogic.net/2009/09/setting-default-duration-for-new-calender-events/
@Pete & @Chris – I think you are pushing the boundaries of what SharePoint formulas can do.
Depending on your need you could do the calculation client side using JavaScript :-
http://pathtosharepoint.wordpress.com/2008/08/25/a-countdown-for-tasks-lists/
[...] asked in another post: “When a calendar event is being created, I want the end date/time to automatically populate [...]
What about when you have due dates that are 30, 45, or even 60 days out? How do you address the multiple weekends?
Nevermind figured it out !!!!!
[...] I do that? Well I found a great post Working Days, Weekdays and Holidays in SharePoint Calculated Columns that describes how the WEEKDAY formula works and understood that I just needed to change my [...]
[...] My inspiration came from this blog: http://blog.pentalogic.net/2008/11/working-days-weekdays-holidays-sharepoint-calculated-columns/ [...]
To work with hours simple divide by 24.
Eg. = [MyDatetimeColumn] + 3/24
Adds 3 hours.
@Damo – I’ve written about that here – SharePoint Calculated Columns – adding hours to a date field
I blogged about calculating total hours, holiday hours working hours and non-working hours here:
http://www.spindepth.com/2010/06/calculating-business-hours-in.html
Basically its too difficult to do all this with calculated columns, so I have a content editor web part that has a button that uses javascript to update a list’s calculations, kind of like a refresh button.