Hopefully, the above information has been helpful to understand the basics. The date difference in months, ignoring days and years. The date difference in days, ignoring years. The date difference in days, ignoring months and years. Number of days between the start date and end date. Number of complete months between the dates.
Number of complete years between the start and end dates. Overall, 6 units are available, which are described in the following table. By supplying different units, you can get the DATEDIF function to return the date difference in days, months or years. Unit - the time unit to use when calculating the difference between two dates. In your formulas, the end date must always be greater than the start date, otherwise the Excel DATEDIF function returns the #NUM! error. For instance, the following formula counts how many days there are between today's date and 20 May, 2015. In the 1900 date system, the following formula is another way to calculate months between two dates from the previous example (1 and 2): Although fully supported, this method is not reliable because date numbering varies on different computer systems. Since Microsoft Excel stores each date as a serial number beginning with January 1, 1900, you can put numbers corresponding to the dates directly in the formula. The following formula calculates the number of months between the specified dates: Excel understands dates in many formats, for example "2", "", "0", etc. For example, the following formula counts the number of days between the dates in cells A1 and B1: In your DATEDIF formulas, you can input the dates is various ways, such as: To put it differently, start_date and end_date are two dates to calculate the difference between. Start_date - the initial date of the period you want to calculate.Įnd_date - the ending date of the period.
If you have been following our blog series, you already know how to insert and format dates in your worksheets, how to calculate days, weeks, months and years as well as add and subtract dates. Over the past few weeks, we investigated nearly every aspect of working with dates and times in Excel. In this tutorial, you will find a simple explanation of the Excel DATEDIF function and a few formula examples that demonstrate how to compare dates and calculate the difference in days, weeks, months or years.