Add/Subtract Months from a Date

Formulas and functions provide the logic that powers spreadsheets. Managing programming logic is always a challenge, but keeping track of programming logic across multiple cells, sheets, and workbooks can be particularly difficult, especially as spreadsheets growand are reused. What's more, the formula and function capabilities built into Excel might not always be what you want, further complicating the situation. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways you can keep your formulas and functions sane.

Excel is well suited to work with dates, but adding and subtracting months from specific dates can be a problem, since months have different numbers of days. Thankfully, Excel provides a couple solutions to this problem.

It's common to want to use Excel to add an arbitrary number of months to a specific date. For example, if cell A1 houses the date 31-Aug-2007, you might want to add (or subtract) one month to that date. Because not all months have the same number of days, there will always be dispute over the number of days to use to represent a month. This tutorial presents two ways that take care of that problem.