date calculations

[catwood]

can anyone tell me how to get excel to calculate the differnece between two dates.

[mdbct]

It's as simple as subtracting the two dates (or cells containing the dates). Assuming the dates are in A1 and B1. Your formula would be =A1-B1 assuming A1 is the later of the two dates.

[stevesunfold]

=a3-a2
that easy

change cells to whatever the dates ar ein

[catwood]

yes i tried that bit it just puts another date in the answer cell???

[daddylonglegs]

That's just a formatting issue. Change the format of the result cell to either general or number

[catwood]

Thanks for coming back daddylonglegs,

I tried that suggestioon as well but with the following dates for instance: 1/2/1950 and 11/11/2008 the answer cell when converted to either number or general reads 21468 which as I understand it is how excel 'sees' a date.

what I'm trying to do is to determine a formula that will give me the difference in months between two dates. I work for a training organisation and we have learners on programme for varying lengths of time.

I need to create a spreadsheet formula that will automatically record the number of months a learner will be on prgramme from his start date to his finish date and express the answer in months.

any further advice would be much appreciated.

[arthurbr]

Hi,
the DATEDIF function will give you the number of months between two dates try =datedif(startdate,enddate,"m") ( not documented by MS anymore)
Also do some searching on the forum for this function because there seem to be some problems with it.
Good luck

[daddylonglegs]

I tried that suggestioon as well but with the following dates for instance: 1/2/1950 and 11/11/2008 the answer cell when converted to either number or general reads 21468 which as I understand it is how excel 'sees' a date.

21468 doesn't represent a date, it's the number of days between the two dates. As arthurbr says, you can get the difference in months by using DATEDIF. This function does have some problems but it should work fine for what you need, see further information on DATEDIF here