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Spreadsheet Basics

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The EDATE Function

2:18 with Michael Watson

EDATE is a useful way to save yourself time from having to write out dates repeatedly. EDATE uses months, and calculates time differences based on a value in months that you enter into the formula.

Being able to work with dates in spreadsheets is really important. 0:00
And it's particularly useful for financial modeling purposes, for 0:04
example, when calculating interest payments based on days in a month or year. 0:08
EDATE is a useful way to save yourself time from having to write out dates repeatedly. 0:13
This is useful if you are building a spreadsheet that covers multiple 0:18
time periods, or has to be consistently updated over time. 0:20
Let's take a look at an example of EDATE. 0:24
First, I'm just gonna enter a random date, January 1st, 2017, completely arbitrary. 0:26
Then, let's look through the syntax of EDATE. 0:34
EDATE uses months and calculates time differences based on 0:37
a value in months that you enter into the formula. 0:40
So, I write out EDATE parentheses. 0:42
Then as you can see, it asks start date, comma, then months. 0:47
A positive number in the months section indicates the number of months 0:52
after the supplied date. 0:56
A negative number will give you a month or months before the supplied date. 0:57
So, here I'm gonna select Jan 1, 2017 as my start date, 1:02
and then I'm gonna add 1 for one additional month. 1:06
If I enter -6 here, it'll give me July of 2016. 1:12
I'll put it back to 1, and copy this out. 1:22
So as you can see, we have all the dates for the entire year, and 1:29
I didn't have to manually enter those every single time. 1:32
EDATE can be a big time saver for you. 1:36
So now we have all the months for 1:38
the year, but let's say you don't wanna progress by month, that's okay. 1:40
Instead of using EDATE, you can just reference the date that you're interested 1:44
as your start date, and you can simply add 1 for a day. 1:49
There you go. 1:53
Now you have January 2nd and you can just copy that formula all the way down. 1:54
So if you're updating the spreadsheet for your boss that you have daily updates, 1:59
you can just put this formula instead of having to manually enter the date 2:04
each time. 2:07
You know, it doesn't have be one day, it can be a week. 2:08
And there you go, you have a similar situation. 2:14