Silly Excel trick:
I want to know how many days there are between 10/1/09 and 8/1/2010
I enter the following formula:
=(DAYS360(B1,C1,TRUE))
B1 is the name of a cell. You can put either date there- Excel has no sense of time and doesn’t care.
In cell C1, put the other date.
If you happen to enter your dates in some other cell, like Y2 and Z3, change the formula to match: =(DAYS360(Y2,Z3,TRUE))
That’s it! Hit enter and you’ll see your answer.
Here’s how it looks with the original formula:
Formulas are so terrifying! Now as to why you might want to count days…
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Thanks, Patricia! Terrific site – I’ll add it to our links. And now that you’ve pointed it out, there are lots of reasons you might want to calculate the number of days between two dates.
Here is a link to a great website to calculate the duration between two dates http://www.timeanddate.com/date/duration.html
It also has the capability to add to or subtract from a date http://www.timeanddate.com/date/dateadd.html
You can explore on the site for other uses, but these two I use a lot.
I especially liked it when I worked in a legal office and would need to diarize 30 days from the date the statement of claim was issued, or when I have a hotel contract and need to know that in 60 days from the date of signing is when I can cancel without penalty.