Excel treats dates as integers. This means you can add and subtract them, which can be useful for telling you how many days there are until that next deadline or event of yours. In this article, we will use Excel’s DATE, YEAR, MONTH, DAY, and TODAY functions to show you how to calculate the number of days until your next birthday or any other annual event.
Excel stores dates as integers. By default, Excel uses “1” to represent 01/01/1900 and each day after that is one greater. Type in 01/01/2000 and switch the format to “Number” and you’ll see “36526” appear. If you subtract 1 from 36526, you can see that there were 36525 days in the 20th century. Alternatively, you could enter a future date and subtract the result of the TODAY function to see how many days away that date is from today.
A Quick Summary of Date-Related Functions
Before we dive into some examples, we need to go over several simple date-related functions, including Excel’s TODAY, DATE, YEAR, MONTH, and DAY functions.
TODAY
Syntax: =TODAY()
Result: The current date
DATE
Syntax: =DATE(year,month,day)
Result: The date designated by the year, month, and day entered
YEAR
Syntax: =YEAR(date)
Result: The year of the date entered
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