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.

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 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.

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 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

The DATEVALUE function in Excel is designed to convert a date stored as text into a proper Excel date value. This is especially useful when importing data from external sources (like CSV files, databases, or manual entries) where dates are not always formatted correctly for calculations.

The DATE function in Excel is one of the most essential tools for anyone working with time-based data. It allows you to create a valid Excel date from three separate inputs: year, month, and day. Whether you're building financial models, automating reports, or managing timelines, the DATE function ensures accurate and consistent date creation.

The VALUE function in Excel converts text representations of numbers into actual numeric values. This function is especially helpful when numbers are stored as text and you need to perform mathematical operations on them—like sums, averages, or comparisons.

The UNICHAR function in Excel returns the Unicode character referenced by a given numeric code point. It is the modern equivalent of the CHAR function, but unlike CHAR, which is limited to ANSI (ASCII) characters (0–255), UNICHAR supports the full range of Unicode characters.

The SEARCH function in Excel is used to find the position (as a number) of one text string within another. Unlike the FIND function, SEARCH is not case-sensitive and supports the use of wildcards, making it more flexible for general text searches.

The REPT function in Excel is used to repeat a text string a specified number of times. This can be particularly useful for data visualization, creating in-cell bar charts, or generating repeated patterns or placeholders in your spreadsheet

The NUMBERVALUE function in Excel is used to convert text representations of numbers into actual numeric values, especially when the text uses non-standard decimal or thousands separators. This is extremely helpful when working with data imported from CSV files, foreign locales, or web scraping, where formatting may vary.

The FIND function in Excel is used to locate the position of a substring (a piece of text) within another string. It returns the position number of the first character where the substring is found. The function is case-sensitive and does not allow wildcards, making it ideal for precise string matching.

The CODE function in Excel returns the numeric code for the first character in a text string. In most cases, this will be the ASCII code (on Windows systems) or Unicode code point (on some platforms) of that character. It is often used when analyzing, comparing, or transforming text data—especially in cases where characters must be interpreted programmatically.

When working with functions like VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, or MATCH, Excel often returns a #N/A error if it can't find a match. These errors are expected in many workflows, but they can be confusing to users or disrupt downstream calculations. Enter: the IFNA function—purpose-built to handle #N/A errors only while allowing other types of errors to pass through untouched.

In some investment instruments, the entire interest payment is made at the maturity date, rather than in periodic coupon installments. These are often short-term notes or zero-coupon debt instruments with interest. Excel’s YIELDMAT function is designed to calculate the annual yield of such securities—helping investors accurately compare returns on different types of debt instruments.