What if you need to adjust your project’s date by 5 weeks and you need it to update on an urgent basis? Stuck with the calculations right! Don’t worry here we will discuss how to use the date function on excel to add/subtract dates on the spreadsheet. You can do this very easily with a WPS spreadsheet. WPS is an all-in-one software where you will get all the necessary tools available right at your fingertips. You can download this software for free. This software includes Documents, Presentations, PDFs, Spreadsheets under one umbrella.
This software is supported by many Operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and not to forget Android.
Add/Subtract Months From a Specific DATE Using EDATE Function
This Date Function on Excel requires two inputs, One is the Start Date and Another is the Number of months you want to add or subtract from the given date. For Addition you need to use
= EDATE(A2,B2)
For Subtraction all you need to do is to put a negative number in the place of month.
=EDATE(A2,-B2)
Here just for the heads up, sometimes you might see that excel display results in the serial number for e.g 1 jan,2013 might get displayed as 40178 because of the format that you already have set. Because excel stores dates as sequential numbers by default. It takes January 1,1900 as serial number 1, so any date after will get displayed as a serial according to this date.
What to do if your current date displays as a serial number?
Follow the following steps to continue:-
Press Ctrl+1/Command+1(for mac) , then select the number tab, then click date and select the date format you want and press OK. Now you will get the value as in Date Format instead of a serial Number.
Subtracting Dates Using Date Function on Excel
You can even directly put the date and subtracts it using the DATE(year,month,day) function and can subtract it from the other date.
In the image, here we have put two dates directly just to find out the number of days in between.
Formula – =DATE(year,month,date)-DATE(year,month,date)
E.g – DATE(2016,05,22)-DATE(2013,06,23)
Addition of Date using Date Function on Excel
Here I want a complete addition of the two dates which not only includes the number of days in between but it will also calculate the number of months and year in between the two given dates. For instance take the example used in the figure. Here the taken dates are May 5,2023 which needs to add to the date May 5,2022, after using the formula we get the resultant date as 08/09/2145.
Formula – =DATE(year,month,date)+DATE(year,month,date)
More About Date Function on Excel
Life will be much easier if you learn these excel function and if your work involves dates, days calculation then you must have the in-depth knowledge of Date Function on Excel. With WPS you will get all the tools under one umbrella and it will be much easier for you to work unlike many other tools available in the market which require you to download all the tools separately.
WPS is an all-in-one software which is compatible with all the Operating systems which also includes Mac, iOs, Linux, Android. Its installation is quite user friendly, all you need to do is to go to its official website and download its zip file which will lead you to installation of this software in your mac/laptop. Now you can get the membership for free and start editing your sheets or pdfs and many more.
