How do you use DATE in Excel?

Answer 1

The DATE function can build a date from three different values, using the year, the month and the year. So if you wanted to get the 19th of June 1972, you could do it like this:

=DATE(1972,6,19)

You can use cell references in it to create dates very quickly, like getting the same date for different years. So you could quickly put a list of years in a column, say column A, starting in cell A2. Then in B2, in order to list the 1st of January for each of those years, you could type in:

=DATE(A2,1,1)

Then you could copy that down column B for each value in column A. You would now have a list of dates. It is a very useful function when you need to quickly create dates.