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Microsoft Excel 2016 Date and Time EDATE functions

In our last video, we showed how Microsoft Excel 2016 uses date and time functions. Now that you know the logic Microsoft uses to work with dates and times, you can use a variety of formulas to help make your job easier.

In this video, we will focus on a few more useful formulas that are the most common. Suppose you are creating a spreadsheet for all of your existing service contracts, and you want to keep track of when your contracts started and when they will end. Using the “EDATE” function you can tell Excel to add or subtract any number of days, weeks, months or years after a given date to produce the correct contract end date.

For example, if you are looking to find out when your contract will end one year from the start date, you would use the formula =EDATE(cell,12), which will add 12 months to the referenced date. Subsequently, if you have a five-year contract, you can multiply twelve months by five to get the correct date. That formula would be written as =EDATE(cell,5*12).

This formula is useful when calculating time in hours, minutes and seconds as well. Remember that dates are stored as whole numbers in Excel meaning that if you want to add 12 hours to a date, you would calculate the hours after the decimal point as 0.5.

There are countless ways to use these formulas and there are just as many applications that call for their use. Understanding the basic principles of how Excel uses dates and times will allow you to apply these formulas with ease. Once you get the hang of it, you can go to Microsoft’s support website to find many other useful functions.

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Use Date and Time Functions in Microsoft Excel 2016

In today’s video, we are going to show you how to work with dates and times in Microsoft Excel 2016. First, we will show you the logic that Excel uses to calculate dates, and then we will show you how you can work with this logic.

It is useful to understand that Excel sees dates as numbers, adding one number for every day after the first of January 1900. The hours, minutes and seconds are stored as decimal values. Knowing this will help you be able to work with the date and time functions more easily.

The next step in working with dates and times is to know the “Today” function, which will bring up the current date in any cell, and the “Now” function, which will bring up the current date and time. If you need to reference a date in your spreadsheet, it is easier to type in the equal sign followed by “Today” and Excel will automatically populate the date for you.

Another common function is knowing how to calculate someone’s age using their date of birth in a formula. To do this you will need to know how to use either the “INT” or Integer function or the “YEARFRAC” function. Both will calculate the difference between a recorded date and the current date simply by using them in an equation.

Working with dates and times in Excel is very straight forward once you know how they are being processed. Knowing how to use functions to manipulate dates and times will help make you more accurate and efficient when working in Excel.

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Microsoft Excel 2016 Nested ‘IF’ Formula

In our last video, we covered how to use “IF” formula in Microsoft Excel 2016. The IF formula allows you to ask a cell in a spreadsheet if a statement is true or false. This basic formula will allow you to build complex calculators in Excel which will help you be more efficient in your work.

In this video, we will dive deeper into Excel IF formula’s to show you how to ask if more than one statement is true or false. A good example of this would be calculating A, B, C or D grades for a class of students. In this example, you would need to print a letter grade for a score that each student received on a test. Here, a letter would represent a score between two numbers and the IF formula would need to check which statement was true and which was false.

This is a slightly more complex use of the IF formula, however, with a little practice, you will find that this formula can save you from a lot of data entry and additional work.

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How To Use Microsoft Excel 2016 “IF” Formula

One of the most powerful functions of Microsoft Excel 2016 is the logical formula. Especially the “IF” formula. The IF formula is a way for you to apply logic to your spreadsheet cells to make customized calculations just by entering data. It takes a little practice but once you get used to this function you will be able to build complex calculators simply by using the IF formula.
IF formulas look to see if a statement is True or False. If the statement is true the logical formula produces one calculation. If the statement if False then it produces another calculation.
In this video, we will review a few of the operators that allow you to use the IF logic effectively. These operators include equal to, greater than, less than, greater than or equal to, less than or equal to and the not equal to. Using these operators, you will be able to manipulate the IF formula for most any calculation.
This may seem complex but once you understand the format used to build this formula it is really quite simple. It will help to start by understanding what you want the calculation to do. The best way to do that is to write out what you want to calculate. An example of this would be “IF the number is greater than or equal to 100, print yes. Otherwise, print no.” Setting this formula for any cell will allow Excel to apply logic and make a quick calculation.

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