Being able to work with dates in spreadsheets is really important.

And it's particularly useful for financial modeling purposes, for

example, when calculating interest payments based on days in a month or year.

EDATE s a useful way to save yourself time from having to write out dates repeatedly.

This is useful if you are building a spreadsheet that covers multiple

time periods, or has to be consistently updated over time.

Let's take a look at an example of EDATE.

First, I'm just gonna enter a random date, January 1st, 2017, completely arbitrary.

Then, let's look through the syntax of EDATE.

EDATE uses months and calculates time differences based on

a value in months that you enter into the formula.

So, I write out EDATE parentheses.

Then as you can see, it asks start date, comma, then months.

A positive number in the months section indicates the number of months

after the supplied date.

A negative number will give you a month or months before the supplied date.

So, here I'm gonna select Jan 1, 2017 as my start date,

and then I'm gonna add 1 for one additional month.

If I enter -6 here, it'll give me July of 2016.

I'll put it back to 1, and copy this out.

So as you can see, we have all the dates for the entire year, and

I didn't have to manually enter those every single time.

EDATE can be a big time saver for you.

So now we have all the months for

the year, but let's say you don't wanna progress by month, that's okay.

Instead of using EDATE, you can just reference the date that you're interested

as your start date, and you can simply add 1 for a day.

There you go.

Now you have January 2nd and you can just copy that formula all the way down.

So if you're updating the spreadsheet for your boss that you have daily updates,

you can just put this formula instead of having to manually enter the date

each time.

You know, it doesn't have be one day, it can be a week.

And there you go, you have a similar situation.