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