How to auto populate the next week in excel

Question

I am making an on-call schedule in excel and I can't for the life of me find an easy way to populate the dates. For example, someone is on call from Monday to Sunday, January 2nd - January 8th. Then the next person is on call from January 9th - January 15th. I am trying to figure out a way or formula to just "Drag" down the column and it input the next 7 day range. I have tried input the start date and end date in a separate cell, then using concatenate but it returns the date number in excel (forgot what its called). I also tried =(A1&" - "&B1) but that returns the same 5 digit number.

Any help or pointers are greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Previous date + 7

If you have genuine dates, say in cells A1 "start date" and B1 "end date":

Jan 2    Jan 8

Then the next line will be

=A1+7    =B1+7

Verify Dates

To see, if the "Dates" you entered are realy dates excel can work with like that, apply "General formatting" to the A1 and B1 cells. If the resulting value is an Interer or a Decimal number, you are golden. If the resulting value did not change, you have a text and you need to apply different approach.

Answer 2

Perhaps you are looking for this:

=TEXT(A1,"d-mmm")&" - "&TEXT(B1,"d-mmm")

The formatting specification can be copied from the formatted cell properties.