The Excel Edate function returns a date that is a specified number of months before or after a supplied start date.
The syntax of function is:
Where the arguments are as follows:
| start_date | - | The initial date, from which to count the number of months. |
| months | - | The number of months to add to (or subtract from) the start_date. |
Note that Microsoft advises that you do not type dates directly into functions, as Excel interprets text representations of dates differently, depending on the date interpretation settings on your computer.
Therefore the start_date argument for the Edate function should be input as either:
Column B of the following spreadsheet shows six examples of the Excel Edate function.
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Formulas:
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Results:
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The above examples illustrate that:
The function is able to cope with months that do not contain the same day number as the start_date. For example:
Note also that, as recommended by Microsoft, in all of the above calls to the Edate function, the start_date has been supplied as a cell reference.
For further examples of the Excel Edate function, see the Microsoft Office website.
If you get an error from the Excel Edate function, this is likely to be one of the following:
| #NUM! | - |
Occurs if the date resulting from the calculation is not valid. (E.g. Using the function to calculate the date that is one month before 01/01/1900 would return the #NUM! error as Excel cannot handle dates prior to 01/01/1900). |
| #VALUE! | - |
Occurs if either:
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