I might not post many Excel snippets, but I’m collecting them into a small Excel Snippets series to make them easy to find.
Most, if not all, of the programming/scripting languages I work with will have a function allowing you to calculate a difference between two dates, but I always have to look them up.
It’s not too difficult in Excel; this formula can be used to work out the number of days difference between the values in cells A2 (start date) and A3 (end date):
=DATEDIF(A2,A3,"D")
The highlighted section can be several values depending on how you want the date difference calculated:
| Unit | Returns |
|---|---|
| D | The number of days between the supplied dates. |
| M | The number of months between the supplied dates. |
| Y | The number of years between the supplied dates. |
| MD | The number of days between the supplied dates ignoring the months and years. |
| YM | The number of months between the supplied dates with the days and years ignored. |
| YD | The number of days between the supplied dates with the years ignored. |
More details and examples on these units are available from the Microsoft Support article which notes they don’t recommend MD, but, to be honest, I don’t see much use for any of the last three listed above.
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