Knowing how to use Excel date values can help you save a ton of time in your day to day spreadsheet chores. Let us prepare for your date with the sheet using these 10 handy tips.
Before jumping on to the tips, it helps to know how excel represents the date and time.
Microsoft Excel stores dates as sequential numbers … January 1, 1900 is serial number 1, and 28 July, 2021 is serial number 44405 because it is 44,405 days after January 1, 1900. Excel stores times as decimal fractions because time is considered a portion of a day.
So you see, Date and Time are in fact numbers in Excel. Just enter a date in your excel sheet and format it as number to see its equivalent numeric value. If a date is 29-July-2021 and Excel represents it as 44406.
Similarly, 9PM on 29-July-2021 is represented as 44406.875
How-to use Excel date values and formulas
Now that you know the little secret behind date / time, lets move to the 10 tips.
1. Test whether a date is future or past
You can find whether a date is past or future or today using simple if formula like: =if(this_date=today(),"Today",if(this_date < today(),"Past","Future"))
today() is the spreadsheet function using which you can find today’s date.
2. Find the number of days between two dates
Since dates are represented as sequential numbers in excel, in order to find out how many days are between any given 2 dates, just subtract one from another. For eg. you can use =today()-date(1947,8,15) to find how many days since India’s independence (August 15, 1947).
3. Formatting dates
Having date / time in the sheet is not enough if you can not make it look like the way you want. For eg. you may want to show date as “Wednesday, 28 July, 2021”. You can use cell formatting to do this. Just select the cell with date and hit ctrl+1 and in the “Number” tab select “Custom” as category and mention “dddd, dd mmmm, yyyy” as format string.
Try these other date formats as well.
Learn more about custom cell formatting.
4. Auto-filling only weekdays
We all know that in order to fill a series of dates in Excel sheet, you just need to enter first few dates and then select the range and drag to auto fill the selection with rest of the dates. But what if you need to fill only weekdays?
You can do that easily with Auto fill option – “weekdays only” as shown on the right. learn more.
5. Find out the day of week from a given date
Finding whether a day is weekend or weekday is useful if you are making project plans or resource allocation sheets. You can do this by simply using weekday() function. For eg. =weekday("07/28/2021") would return 4 (Excel, by default starts the week at Sunday, hence Wednesday is indicated as 4).
If you would like to start the week with Monday like most of us do, use =weekday("07/28/2021",2).
6. Highlight weekends using conditional formatting
Often when you are making project plans or reports, it helps if the weekends or after office hours can be grayed out. You can do this easily with conditional formatting as shown below:
In order to do this, we can test whether a given a day is weekend or not in conditional formatting by =WEEKDAY(this_date,2)>5 as weekday() returns 6 and 7 for Saturday and Sunday.
You can use similar logic to highlight after office hours (before 9AM or after 5PM) for time values. Learn these 5 tips to master conditional formatting.
7. Adding / Subtracting dates
Since Excel dates are nothing but numbers, you can find out the difference between two given dates by just subtracting one from another. For eg. =DATE(2021,7,31)-DATE(2021,7,1) will return 30
In order to add n number of days to a given date, you can just add that number to given date. For eg. ="07/20/2021"+26 will return 08/15/2021
8. Ensuring a valid date or time is entered in a cell
When sharing your sheets with others to enter some data, it may be useful if you can restrict them to enter only valid date values in cells that require date value. You can do that using cell data validation feature in excel. Just select the cell to which you want to apply date / time validation, go to data ribbon > validation and set type as “Date” or “Time” and specify criteria.
For example, you can specify criteria like the one above to ensure that date entered is in year 2018. What more, using message option of data validation settings you can even show messages like this:
9. Insert today’s date, current time using key board shortcuts
Just go to the cell where you want to insert date and press ctrl+;
To get current time, use ctrl+shift+; ( thus ctrl+: )
Btw, if you are planning to get today’s date or current time using formulas, you can use today() and now(). Also learn these 11 very useful excel keyboard shortcuts.
10. Top Date functions for you
Excel has many Date & Time functions. Here is a list of some of the most important ones to help you use date values in Excel.
Date & Time formulas
| To get | Use this | Example Result | Function used |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day of week number | WEEKDAY(date) | 4 | WEEKDAY() |
| Month number | MONTH(date) | 7 | MONTH() |
| Year | YEAR(H3) | 2021 | YEAR() |
| Day number | DAY(date) | 28 | DAY() |
| Name of the month | TEXT(date,"MMMM") | July | TEXT() |
| Same day, next month | EDATE(date,1) | 28 August 2021 | EDATE() |
| End of the month | EOMONTH(date,0) | 31 July 2021 | EOMONTH() |
| Current date | TODAY() | 28 July 2021 | TODAY() |
| 7 days from today | TODAY()+7 | 4 August 2021 | TODAY()+7 |
| Gap between two dates | TODAY()-DATE(2021,1,1) | 208 | - (minus) |
| 5 working days from now | WORKDAY(TODAY(),5) | 4 August 2021 | WORKDAY() |
| Number of working days in a month | NETWORKDAYS(DATE(2021,7,1),DATE(2021,7,31)) | 22 | NETWORKDAYS() |
That is all, with these 10 tips I hope I made your date with that spreadsheet is made little exciting.
3 Important Date formulas for finance & accounting people
If you work in finance or accounting professions, using dates is an important part of your job. Apart from all the above tips, you also need to learn how to calculate:
- Quarter from a date (both calendar & financial)
- First working day of a month
- Last working day of a month
See this short video to understand how to calculate these (watch it on my YouTube channel)
Download the file demoed in the video.
Common problems when working with dates in Excel
When using date & time related values or formulas in Excel, often you might notice some problems. Use this check list to fix the problem.
- Excel shows ##### instead of date or time values
This can happen if your cell is too small to show the value. Try adjusting column width.
This can also happen if you use incorrect values as date & time. For example, if you try to format negative numbers as date, you will see ##### - Excel cannot understand my date
When trying to convert a cell or value to date, sometimes Excel cannot understand your input. This is because Excel relies on your regional settings to understand dates. So if your usual date format is mm/dd/yyyy, then Excel expects the cells (or values) to have same format in order to convert them to dates. If you have dd/mm/yyyy values, then Excel may not convert the dates. To fix the problem, read extract dates from text tutorial
Download Date How-to & Tutorial Workbook
Click here download example workbook with several date calculations and format detail. Play with it to learn more.
Learn more about Excel Date & Time functions
- 42 tips for Excel time travelers
- Rounding time to nearest hour or 15 minutes
- How many Mondays are between two dates
- How to highlight overdue dates
Got a problem working with dates? Post it in comments
If you have any date or time related issues, please post a comment so our community or I can help you. Got an interesting tip or formula about working with dates? Please do share it so I can learn from you.
24 Responses
I’d suggest simply using the subtotal function and filtering the data using the Win/Loss column. You get the same results and the formula is more comprehensible.
@John
That is one option.
There are times however when you want to see the whole data table or a filtered subset and still want to produce summary reports against an unfiltered field.
Is there a particular reason why you are using a comma and the unary (–) operator for the second array in the SUMPRODUCT formula? It seems to work the same if you were to string the arrays together using the asterisk (*). The advantage is that SUMPRODUCT treats the entire string of arrays as a single array.
@Mathew
Your correct, There is no difference.
I thought it may have been easier to explain this method.
Is there a way to do this on a large set of data? As in ~100,000 rows? When I try I get an error because the formula becomes too long. It says the max length of a formula is 8,192 characters. Excel 2010.
How do I incorporate a specific text within a cell for the second array. For instance, – -(C7:C13=”Apple”)
when I chose a specific text the formula does not work.
@RB
I am not sure what is the issue as if I use the sample data in the post the following work fine
Count:
=SUMPRODUCT(SUBTOTAL(3,OFFSET(C7:C13,ROW(C7:C13)-MIN(ROW(C7:C13)),,1)), –(C7:C13=”L”))
Sum:
=SUMPRODUCT(SUBTOTAL(3,OFFSET(C7:C13,ROW(C7:C13)-MIN(ROW(C7:C13)),,1)),(C7:C13=”L”)*(D7:D13))
You may want to check that there are no leading or trailing spaces in your list of Apples
I should have given a better explanation. Heres my situation. I have a column with cells filled with names like Column 1, Column 2, Pier 1, Pier 2, etc. If the cell just contained Pier and searched for that it works. But because it has other characters in the cell its not recognizing the pier. So how can I extract specific characters of a string of text in this formula?
Hopefully this was a better explanation
Hello-
This formula works pretty well for me except that it slow down excel and prevents some of my macros from working. I was wondering if there was a way to program this in VBA so that excel isn’t always trying to recalculate it. I would like to use a push of a button to get it to run then paste in a cell.
Thanks!
I am trying to sum filtered data in a column, but would want to ignore the negative values in the column. How to go about doing this?
@Akshay
Why not just add a filter to that column to only show the values greater than zero?
The negative values are required for reporting purposes, but their effect on the total is distorting the required output. Please advise.
@Akshay
I’d suggest making a post in the Chandoo.org Forums
http://forum.chandoo.org/
Attach a sample file to simplify the task
I have this working for counting and summing, however, I have a list and for the second array, I need a criteria. That is, I’m looking for b13:b200=”01.??.??” or =left((a1,2) or something like that. These types of criteria matches do not appear to work as I get a blank as a result.
Thanks!
@Bob
As your formula b13:b200=”01.??.??” looks like you are trying to check the first day of the month of the range
What about trying Day(B13:B200)=1
Hai Experts,
i understood this formula well and working fine in MS Excel 2013
but when the same am trying to place in google Spreadsheet it shows error as
“SUMPRODUCT has mismatched range sizes. Expected row count: 1. column count: 1. Actual row count: 2014, column count: 1.” and as a result #VALUE! Appears in cell.
Can anyone please help me how would i get it done in Google Spread sheet
or is there any other formula as a substitute for this.
Thank you very much.
thanks for providing this.. but why does excel keeps on prompting Circular referencing in cell D3?
@Vivek
I don’t know
I just downloaded the file and it is working fine and not showing that error
Goto the Formulas, Calculation Options Tab and check that Calculation is set to Automatic
What version of Excel and Windows are you using ?
I know that this forum is for MS Excel, but I am trying to help someone who is working in Google Sheets. The below formula works in Excel but Google Sheets returns:
“SUMPRODUCT has mismatched range sizes. Expected row count: 1. column count: 1. Actual row count: 39000, column count: 1.” and as a result #VALUE! Appears in cell.
This is the same problem asked by Srichirin above. Does anyone know if there is a formula for Google Sheets that will replicate what MS Excel does?
=SUMPRODUCT(SUBTOTAL(3,OFFSET($C$6:$C$39500,ROW($C$6:$C$39500)-MIN(ROW($C$6:$C$39500)),,1)),- -($C$6:$C$39500=H1),($D$6:$D$39500))
Trying to find a SUMPRODUCT formula that counts the word Closed by date for the last 7 days in a filtered list.
=COUNTIF(M:M,”>”&TODAY()-7) works ok for unfiltered count Column M contains Closure dates (blank if open) and Column L is Status Open or Closed
@ Terry
Please ask the question at the Chandoo.org Forums
https://chandoo.org/forum/
Please attach a sample file to ensure a quicker more accurate answer
I used this formula and worked like a charm! But, now I’ve been requested to use it but adding not one but two criteria in the same formula. For instance the sum I was doing added negative and positive numbers. I’ve been asked to use the exact same formula but adding that only positive numbers were considered… any idea on how to do this?
How exactly do you do sum filtered cells when two criteria are need not just one?
Thank you so much brother literally I have been struggling since morning to get the sum of the filtered category, however, after reading your blog attentively i got my solution, so thanks a lot once again.