How to work with dates

Let’s take a look.

Here we have a set of random dates in column B.

Using built-in functions, I’ll extract the year, month, and day from each date.

First, I’ll extract the day value using a function calledDAY.

Day takes just one argument: a valid date in serial number format.

When I give it the value in column C, it just returns the day from the date.

To get the month value, I need to use theMONTH function.

Like theDAY function, MONTH requires only the date and returns the month value from the date.

Finally, theYEAR functionwill return just the year.

Now let’s recombine these date components into a date again.

For that, I need to use theDATE function.

DATE takes year, month, and day as separate arguments and returns a valid date.

For example, you could easily add 30 days to a date.

Notice that Excel takes care of changing the month for me.

Likewise, I can add 12 months to a date and Excel will automatically update the year.

If I add 36 months to a date, Excel just rolls the year forward as needed.

When you work with dates this way, you have a lot of flexibility.

No problem, I can just hard code any year I like and reuse the month and day.