If you have an Excel sheet with a lot of dates, chances are you will eventually need to calculate the differences between some of those dates. Maybe you want to see how many months it took you to pay off your debt or how many days it took you to lose a certain amount of weight?

Calculating the difference between dates in Excel is easy, but can become complicated depending on how you want to calculate certain values. The simplest calculation we can do is to get the number of days between two dates. In my example above, I have two dates stored in cells A2 and A3. At the right, you can see the difference between those two dates is days.

Calculate the difference between two dates - Excel

The first formula is just a simple subtraction of the two dates, A3 — A2. Easy and very straight-forward.

How to count the number of days / workdays / weekends between two dates in Excel?

In addition, you can also use the DAYS function. This function takes two arguments: Luckily, you can see the syntax and all supported arguments for the DATEDIF function here. As an added bonus, what if you wanted to calculate the number of weekdays between two dates? Microsoft has provided these here , but if you are too lazy to visit the link, I have provided them below also.

Here are the formulas in Excel:. Note the you should edit the round down formula in the actual cell itself because for some odd reason the entire formula does not show up in the formula bar. In order to see the formula in the cell itself, click on the Formulas tab and then click Show Formulas.

Round up gives me 27 months and round down gives me 26 months, which is accurate, depending on how you want to look at it. Lastly, you can also use the DATEDIF function, but it only calculates full months, so in our case the answer it returns is As with months, years can also be calculated depending on whether you want to count 1 year as a full days or if a change in the year counts. One formula uses DATEDIF and the other uses the YEAR function.

Since the difference in the number of days is only , DATEDIF shows 2 years whereas the YEAR function shows 3 years. Again, this is a matter of preference and depends on what exactly you are trying to calculate. There are also a lot more date functions outside of the ones I mentioned, so feel free to check those out also on the Office Support site.

If you have any questions, feel free to comment. February 4th, by Aseem Kishore File in: MS Office Tips There are 0 comments, care to add yours?

Calculating Number of Days, Weeks, Months and Years between Dates in Microsoft Excel | Microsoft Excel Tips from Excel Tip .com / Excel Tutorial / Free Excel Help

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Welcome to Online Tech Tips — A blog that provide readers with daily computer tutorials, technology news, software reviews, and personal computing tips. My name is Aseem Kishore and I am a professional blogger living in Dallas, TX. I graduated from Emory University in Atlanta, GA in with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. Home About Contact Privacy Policy. How to Subtract Dates in Excel. Days Between Two Dates The simplest calculation we can do is to get the number of days between two dates.

Here are the formulas in Excel: Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Featured Posts 7 OS X Tips for Windows Users How to Check if Your VPN Connection is Actually Encrypted The Best Free Apps for a New iPhone View Saved Wi-Fi WPA, WEP Passwords on OS X.

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