Excel: show day of week does not work (German locale)

Question

In on cell I'm showing the full date (like 01.01.2013 > German format) and in another cell I want to show only the day of week. So I followed the instructions from Microsoft which refer to the TEXT function. But somehow it never works. If I use "ddd" or "dddd" as format string, I get exactly those letters as return value.

Any idea of to fix that?

Cell A1:

31.12.2012 

Cell A2: (German locale)

=TEXT(A1; "ddd") 

The results are ddd

Solution 1

You have to use german TAG t instead of english DAY d if your locale is set to german

=TEXT(A1;"ttt")

In Control Panel go to Regiona and Language and change it to German

then go to your Excel spreadsheet, click any cell with a date in it and select Format Cells. Go to Custom and if you look at the date in german it doesn't use dd mm yyyy it uses german Tag Monat Jahr which oviously is day month year

Solution 2

Answer is from mehow in the comments of this post

if youre in german locale then you have to use ttt instead of ddd Tag = Day

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I think the issue is Excel doesn't know that 31.12.2012 is a date.

If I type in

31/12/2012

instead of

31.12.2012

Then it works as expected.

When using 31.12.2012, if I make the cell type 'date' it doesn't work as you want. Note that when Excel can see it as a date, it right aligns it in the cell. In the following screen, I made the B1 of type date but, it doesn't treat it as such:

---

You could also try to use

=TEXT(WEEKDAY(A1),"dddd")

or

=TEXT(WEEKDAY(A1);"dddd")

(; or , depending on locale)

Solution 3

For German locality I believe you need to replace commas with semi-colon

So the formula would be:

=TEXT(A1;"ddd")

Comments

[Dave]

Can you paste the exact function/code you're using please.

[Matthias]

I added the functions above

[Dave]

Can you confirm what the type of Cell A2 is (text/general etc). Also, did you type the code out or copy it from the MS site?

[Matthias]

A1 is date and A2 is of type general. I typed the formular into Excel by myself but following the descriptions on the Microsoft website.

[Matthias]

My Windows and Excel versions are both US but keyboard and locale is German. So Excel automatically modified 31/12/2012 to 31.12.2012. It knows that it's a date.

[Matthias]

I use ; instead , Otherwise Excel does not except the formular anyway. Fixed it above.

[Admin]

no, if youre in german locale then you have to use ttt instead of ddd Tag = Day :)

[Matthias]

Thanks, that did the trick. Even though all formulars are in English, I need to use "ttt" as format string. Thanks. By the way: in German locale 31.12.2012 is automatically accepted as a valid date.