MS Excel: date & time function

Dates are critical in managing data across industries—whether you're tracking financial performance, organizing historical records, or scheduling future events. Excel’s YEAR function plays a key role in date manipulation by extracting the year from a given date. It's simple but powerful when used in financial models, time-series analysis, and reports requiring year-based grouping or filtering.

While the standard WORKDAY function in Excel helps calculate dates by skipping weekends and holidays, WORKDAY.INTL offers greater flexibility. It allows you to define custom weekend days, which is essential for organizations or countries where weekends differ (e.g., Friday–Saturday or Sunday only).

The WORKDAY function in Excel helps you calculate a future or past date by excluding weekends and (optionally) holidays. It's essential for project planning, due date tracking, and workforce scheduling, where counting only business days is crucial.

The WEEKNUM function in Microsoft Excel returns the week number of a given date. This is especially useful for weekly reporting, payroll, inventory planning, or project management where you want to organize or group data by calendar weeks.

The WEEKDAY function in Excel returns a number representing the day of the week for a given date. It's a vital tool in scheduling, reporting, task management, and conditional formatting, especially when you need to identify weekends or group data by weekdays. For example, if you want to filter out weekends or flag deadlines that fall on Mondays, WEEKDAY makes it possible with just one formula.

The TODAY function in Microsoft Excel is a volatile date function that returns the current system date, dynamically updating each day you open or refresh the workbook. It does not return the time—only the date.

The TIMEVALUE function in Excel is used to convert a time represented as a text string into a decimal number that Excel recognizes as a valid time. This is essential when you’re working with imported data, manual text entries, or systems that output time as text, and you need that information to behave like real time values in calculations or formatting.

The TIME function in Excel is used to combine hours, minutes, and seconds into a single valid Excel time. This is especially helpful when you're working with separate components of time and need to assemble them into a time value that Excel can understand and format correctly.

The SECOND function in Excel allows you to extract the second component (0 to 59) from a time or a date-time value. This is especially useful for time tracking, timestamp breakdown, and any situation where seconds matter—such as logging system events or analyzing performance durations.

The NOW function in Excel returns the current date and time based on your system clock. It is a volatile function, meaning it updates automatically every time the worksheet recalculates. This function is essential for timestamping, dynamic dashboards, real-time calculations, and time tracking systems.

The NETWORKDAYS.INTL function in Excel is a powerful upgrade of the NETWORKDAYS function. It calculates the number of working days between two dates with the flexibility to define which days of the week are considered weekends and exclude optional holidays.

The NETWORKDAYS function in Excel is a built-in date and time function that calculates the number of working days (excluding weekends and optionally holidays) between two dates. It’s widely used in project management, HR leave tracking, finance, and operations to determine how many business days are available or used.

The MONTH function in Microsoft Excel returns the month from a given date. It's widely used in financial reports, project planning, seasonal analysis, and any scenario where understanding or grouping data by calendar months is required.

Time values are essential in scheduling, data logging, and performance tracking. Microsoft Excel’s MINUTE function allows users to extract the minute portion from a given time value. Whether you’re analyzing call durations, meeting times, or timestamps in system logs, this function helps streamline and structure your time-based data.

In global business environments, especially across Europe and international organizations, week numbers often follow the ISO 8601 standard. Microsoft Excel offers the ISOWEEKNUM function to simplify working with ISO-standard week numbers.

Time-based data plays a crucial role in many industries—from employee shift tracking to call center analysis and performance dashboards. The HOUR function in Excel provides a simple way to extract the hour portion of a time value, making it easier to group, analyze, and visualize data by hour intervals.

The EDATE function in Excel allows you to add or subtract a specific number of months to/from a given date. This is especially helpful in financial forecasting, due date calculations, recurring billing schedules, and project planning.

The DAYS360 function in Excel calculates the number of days between two dates based on a 360-day year (12 months of 30 days). This function is primarily used in financial and accounting applications, such as calculating accrued interest, loan schedules, and bond pricing—where many conventions assume a 360-day year for simplicity.

The DAYS function in Excel allows you to calculate the number of days between two dates. This is useful for tasks like calculating age in days, determining time remaining until deadlines, measuring project durations, or analyzing the difference between start and end dates.

MS Excel: DAY function to extract day numbers from dates