Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool with countless functions that simplify our data handling and computational tasks. One popular need when working with data in Excel is the ability to extract the Month and Year from a date. This blog post will take you through a step by step guide on how to achieve this.
The functions we’ll be using in this guide are the MONTH and YEAR functions in Excel.
Extracting Month from a Date
Let’s start off with the MONTH function. This function returns the month of a specific date as a whole number from 1 (January) to 12 (December).
The syntax for the function is as follows:
=MONTH(serial_number)
Where serial_number refers to the date of the month.
For example, if you have a date in cell A1 and you want to get the month number, you would use:
=MONTH(A1)
This will return the month of the date in cell A1 as a number between 1 and 12.
Extracting Year from a Date
Next, we look at the YEAR function. This function returns the year of a particular date as a four-digit number.
The syntax for the function is:
=YEAR(serial_number)
Where serial_number is the date from which you want to extract the year.
For instance, if you have a date in cell A1 and you want to get the year, you would use:
=YEAR(A1)
This will return the year of the date in cell A1 as a four-digit number.
Conclusion
Extracting the month and year from a date can be incredibly useful, particularly when dealing with large datasets or when you need to perform monthly or yearly analysis. The MONTH and YEAR functions make this task simple and efficient.
Remember, practice makes perfect. Therefore, don’t hesitate to try out these functions with different dates to get a solid grasp of how they work. Happy data analyzing!