How do I derive a text day (Monday, Tuesday,...) from a date field (7/21/2016)

[EasyRider]

So far, I have a long, complicated “IF” statement, using WEEKDAY()…
There must be an easier way!

[Chaven]

Create a table with two columns. First column has numbers 1 to 7 and second column text Sun… Sat. Label this table DayOfWeek.

Then use the formula =vlookup(weekday(A1, 1),DayOfWeek,2)

Eg A1 = Date(2000,3,23) result should be Thu

[karolus]

Hallo

=TEXT(A1;"NNN")

[erAck]

Better use TEXT(A1;"DDDD") if you eventually want to save in Excel formats, as the “NNN” and “NNNN” format codes are only available in LibreOffice and OpenOffice(.org)

[mark_t]

Use the CHOOSE function

=CHOOSE(WEEKDAY(J19,2),"Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday","Thursday","Friday","Saturday","Sunday")

[karolus]

the question was about easier way… not about sophisticated one

[mark_t]

Compared to string of IF functions CHOOSE is easier, but of course TEXT is the best and EasyRider should choose that as the best answer. I looked for FORMAT and didn’t realize that function was called TEXT.

[adam1969in]

=WEEKDAY(A1)

and formatting the cell as Date - user defined - “NNNN”
The other answers are right too.

=Text(A1,"DDDD") will be the best one.

[karolus]

And your answer is wrong, also if it produce accidentally the “right” results.
do never patch some Date-formatting on Values which are no real Dates

[adam1969in]

The main formula I recommended is =Text(A,“DDDD”), though it wrongly works with Weekday function.

[mikekaganski]

Just in case someone would still think it’s a “great idea”: the proposed thing is totally wrong. =WEEKDAY(A1) would call functions to analyze the date in A1 and put numbers from 1 to 7 for Sun through Sat. Then applying a user-defined format NNNN to the cell with that number will tell Calc to treat that number as date (it means, Calc will see 1899-12-31 for number 1, 1900-01-01 for number 2, etc. by default), call functions to analyze this date again, and find out which day of the week was that day - and luckily, 1899-12-31 was Sunday… so you will eventually see Sunday in your formula cell, for the cost of double calculations where only one was needed (just put =A1 in the cell, and format NNNN or DDDD).

But what’s worse, this would not only cost more CPU cycles, but will give wrong results, if one used non-default start date (epoch; see Options▸LibreOffice Calc▸Calculate▸Date).