Excel Formulas and Functions For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 12

Dressing Up for Date Functions

In This Chapter

Handling dates

Working with days, months, and years

Getting the value of today

Determining the day of the week

Often when working with Excel, you need to manage dates. Perhaps you have a list of dates when you visited a client and you need to count how many times you were there in September. On the other hand, maybe you are tracking a project over a few months and want to know how many days are in between the milestones.

Excel has a number of useful Date functions to make your work easier! This chapter explains how Excel handles dates, how to compare and subtract dates, how to work with parts of a date (such as the month or year), and even how to count the number of days between two dates. You can always reference the current data from your computer’s clock and use it in a calculation; I’ll show you how.

Understanding How Excel Handles Dates

Imagine if, on January 1, 1900, you starting counting by ones, each day adding one more to the total. This is just how Excel thinks of dates. January 1, 1900, is one; January 2, 1900, ...