Free Microsoft Excel training on Dates

Free Microsoft Excel training is available online at Audit Excel. The online tutorials include step by step instructions and printable versions. What makes the Microsoft Excel trainingat our website different from other tutoring sites is video based tutoring where the actual spreadsheet is open while the instructor leads you through every step. A highlighter makes it possible to identify the exact cell in question.

One of the many topics covered in our free Microsoft Excel training tutorials is working with dates:

EOMONTH and EDATE functions

The EDATE function will generate a date that is a specified number of months before or after a reference date.

EOMONTH on the other hand stands for “end of month” and will generate the date of the last day of the required month which is based on the input start date.

To work with the above functions you will need to active the Analysis Tool pack first. Instructions on how to load and activate the Analysis Tool pack are available at our site.

If you for instance, have an income statement and you want to calculate the correct dates based on the input data you will make use of the EDATE function. The EDATE function is thus used to calculate a date that is a known number of months in the future or the past. The formula for it is for instance,

=EDATE(NOW(),5)

The first date provided is the NOW() and the second parameter will be the number of months in the future which in this case will be 5. The function will then calculate the date 5 months from today. If you want it to calculate 5 months before today you will use -5. It is important to know that it will return a serial number and not textual date.

The syntax for EOMONTH looks like this:

=EOMONTH(base, offset)

Base is the date which will be used as the start point for the calculations. The offset will be number of months after or before the start point.

You can view our video based or printable free Microsoft Excel training on dates under the DATES section of our website.