Heads up! To view this whole video, sign in with your Courses account or enroll in your free 7-day trial. Sign In Enroll
Preview
Start a free Courses trial
to watch this video
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.
Example Files
- you can continue to use the spreadsheet from the last video, or
- open a copy of this spreadsheet to catch up to this video
Reference
Related Functions
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 s 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
You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to download course files.
Sign up