Course outline / Date and time functions
Lesson 38 of 75 · Intermediate · 4 exercises
Building and moving dates
Make dates from parts, move them by months, and find the first and last day of a month.
What you'll practise
- Build a date with DATE
- Move by months with EDATE
- First day of the next month
- First day of the same month
Build a date with DATE
DATE makes a real date from a year, a month and a day held in separate cells.
=DATE(year, month, day)
In cell F2, build a date from A2, B2 and C2.
Move by months with EDATE
Adding 30 days isn't the same as adding a month. EDATE moves a date by whole months and copes with short months.
In cell F2, find the date 1 month after D2.
First day of the next month
EOMONTH gives the last day of a month. Add 1 and you have the first day of the following month.
In cell F2, find the first day of the month after D2.
First day of the same month
In cell F2, find the first day of D2's own month: the end of the previous month, plus 1.
Try it in a real spreadsheet
Every step checks your answer instantly and tells you exactly what to fix.