I know this has been asked before, but I must be missing something. I want to put a border above all rows that contain "Monday".
The formula is =$B$3="*Monday*"
I thought it might be because the value of the cell is actually "4/18/2016" but I manually changed it to "Monday" and the rule still didn't fire. What am I doing wrong?
Having the formula pointing on $B$3 will always be true or false, if $B$3 is Monday or not. You need to make the row a relativ reference, ie the formula should be something like =IF($B3="Monday";TRUE;FALSE).
The omitted $ in front of the row will make this formula look into the first column in every row, thus making a border around all mondays.
In order to improve the formula and assuming that you have a date value in your date column, I would recommend to use the function WEEKDAY() and to check for the numeric value of the weekday (see Microsoft Help).
Use the WEEKDAY() function.
Syntax: WEEKDAY(serial_number,[return_type])
Use this formula in your conditional format, assuming column A contains your dates.
=WEEKDAY(A1,2)=1
With the return type of 2, it starts the week with Monday being the 1st day. So the formula will identify the weekdays that are equal to 1 then format them with your rule.
The problem was two-fold. I fixed the formula to be =$B3="Monday". I also had to create an additional column with the formula of =TEXT(C3,"dddd") so that the value was actually "Monday". As it was before, the content of the cell being "2016/4/18", it was only displaying Monday due to the cell format. This never triggered the condition.
Here is the result with Monday replaced by Saturday and Sunday.
