Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2018 November 14

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November 14

Help with an Excel formula

So, I'm working with an excel spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet I've got the birthdates of children, and I want it to put in another cell how many months from whenever now is until the child turns 18. I've constructed a formula that I think ought to work, but it's giving me a #NUM! error.

Here's what I'm trying (the kid's birthdate is in E2): =DATEDIF((DATE(YEAR(E2)+18,MONTH(E2),DAY(E2))),TODAY(),"m")

Anyone have ideas on how to make it work? ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 19:55, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Rather confusingly, DATEDIF takes the "start date" as its first parameter and "end date" as its second, so if you change the formula to =DATEDIF(TODAY(),DATE(YEAR(E2)+18,MONTH(E2),DAY(E2)),"m") you should get the result you want. (You have a redundant pair of parentheses around the DATE() in your first parameter, which I've removed in the corrected version). AndrewWTaylor (talk) 20:45, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Yay! That works! Thank you so much! ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 20:49, 14 November 2018 (UTC)