How to check current date less than previous date using IF statement

[Rondog21]

Hi guys

I'm not sure about how to check if one date is later than another by using IF statements because of dates being stored as values. E.g. I want to know if Feb is later than Jan using IF(FEB > JAN, "FEB is later than JAN", "JAN IS EARLIER THAN FEB") but this doesn't work.

I want to include an extra nested if statement before a vlookup which checks a certain date value from a report and returns me another text value if date value < current date.

So something like:
=IF(date value < current month date,"text",VLOOKUP(something from some table)).

How do I get around this dates stored as values problem?

Thanks

Rondog

 

[NARAYANK991]

Hi ,

Dates in Excel are just numbers , and you can compare one date with another by using the inequality or equality operators.

Thus , if by current month date you mean today's date , the Excel function which returns this value is the TODAY() function.

Thus an IF statement such as :

=IF(datevalue < TODAY() , "text" , VLOOKUP( ... ))

will work.

In fact dates stored as text present problems ; dates stored as dates i.e. numeric values pose absolutely no problem.

If you just want to compare the months , you can use two methods :

1. The MONTH( ... ) function returns the month for the date which is passed to it as a parameter ; thus :

=MONTH(TODAY())

will return 2 , since we are now in February.

2. The TEXT( ... ) function returns the alphabetic name of the month , either in the format Jan , Feb , Mar ,... or in the long format January , February , March ,...

Thus :

=TEXT(TODAY() , "mmm") will display Feb

=TEXT(TODAY() , "mmmm") will display February.

Narayan