Calculate difference between two dates in Excel
Q: Can anyone help me? I'm trying to determine the difference between 2 dates to determine who old a person is. The first cell would contain the person's birthdate and the second cell would contain today's date. I would appreciate any help.
A: The easiest way to do this is with the DATEDIF function, which although entirely undocumented is present as a built-in function in all recent versions of Excel.
Assuming A1 contains the date of birth and B1 contains =TODAY(), then input in C1:
=DATEDIF(A1,B1,"y")
Other entries in place of the "y" will help you be more precise:
- use "ym" to tell you how many spare months
- use "md" to tell you how many spare days
This formula will tell you an age in Years, months and days:
=DATEDIF(A1,B1,"y") & " years, " & DATEDIF(A1,B1,"ym") & " months," & DATEDIF(A1,B1,"md") & " days"
(NB: Thanks to Glenda Wells for suggesting the last formula.)