Enhancement Request: Allow NO non-working days in WORKDAY function

J. Craig Williams

I would like a small improvement to the WORKDAY function.

For the third argument, we can pass in a range of dates. I want to pass in 0 or false or some other flag to IGNORE working days.

=WORKDAY( {date cell} , 15 , 0 )

would return the date 15 days from now, regardless of project or global settings for non-working days.

I could, of course, use

{ date cell} + some number

but as this thread shows 

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/need-how-if-blank-addends-blank-if-values-sum

that can be prone to error.

If WORKDAY is not the correct place for it (and it likely isn't), what I am looking for the reverse of the NETDAYS function. That function takes two dates and returns the days in between. I want to give a date and the increment and return the date. 

Craig

Richard Rymill SBP

Craig, it makes good sense for this to be enabled? 

Well said. 

RichardR

 

 

CanadaJim

Here is my 2 cents on this topic:

First, enhancement requests should be done using the link on the right: "Submit Product Enhancement Request". So that's probably where this request should be submitted.

Second, the =<DATE>+15 should work flawlessly if you frame it inside the "IFERROR" command that you mentioned at the bottom your linked thread.

And who's to say that "WORKDAY" wouldn't encounter the exact same type of error in certain situations (i.e. the source date field is blank)?

Better to write your formulas to handle error conditions than to rewrite the code to cover for bad data.

J. Craig Williams

CanadaJim

Since they provided the link to the Product Enhancement, I always write the feature requests in both places. I have written elsewhere about why. Your response is the primary reason.

I don't agree with you that the burden of error checking is on the end-user. Since the tool is browser based, everything I had to add takes some part of the processing. By shifting the error checking to the back-end, we are likely to end up with a cleaner system. There is a balance that should be maintained and it is up to the developers to strike that balance.

The reason I wrote this request is that this is not the first time that I have seen other users struggling with this specific functionality. That tells me that something should be done on the back-end because while the front-end solution is to wrap everything in IFERROR(), there is cost to Smartsheet's support staff and those supporting Smartsheet installations all over the world when such errors, common to you and me, are discovered and struggled over. And not everyone knows to use IFERROR().

Craig

CanadaJim

Sorry for intruding, Craig.  Your position is well-founded.  And for the record, I really appreciate your knowledge and support here!

J. Craig Williams

If my written words sounded defensive, that was not my intent.

Not all of my ideas are good ones and the wall never tells me so. I post them to the Community and encourage feedback. 

This would be a low priority for me if I were the developers, unless I was improving formula behavior or something related. But that isn't my call, I can only offer user-experience which some development teams struggle with.

And thank you for your kind words.

Craig