Page 310 - JoFA_2022

TECHNOLOGY Q&A

MICROSOFT EXCEL
Extract and present information about dates in Excel

Q. I receive Excel A. There are several ways to extract and present date Format_text, is the format that we want to apply
spreadsheets information. We will look at a few ways to extract to the text.
regularly that and present information about the day, month, and In order to extract the day and present it as
contain dates. I then year. To help walk through this process, you the three-letter abbreviation, define Value as the
have to manually can download an Excel workbook and access an cell that contains the date. Define Format_text
look up the day accompanying video with the online version of this as “ddd.” See the screenshot below that shows the
of the week that article at journalofaccountancy.com. abbreviated day in cell E3.
represents these Next, let’s extract the day and present it as the
dates. Are there Extract day information full name of the day. Define Value as the cell that
any functions You have a few options to extract and present infor- contains the date. Define Format_text as “dddd.”
that can help mation about the day. Let’s start with using the DAY See the screenshot below that shows the full name
speed this function. The syntax for DAY is DAY(serial_number), of the day in cell G3.
process along? where serial_number is the cell that contains the You can also use the TEXT function to pull the
date. You can see the formula in cell C3 of the number of the day, as we did with the function
screenshot below. DAY. To do this, define Format_text as “dd.” See
Next, we will use the TEXT function. The syntax the screenshot below that shows the number of the
for TEXT is TEXT(Value, Format_text). The first day in cell I3.
argument, Value, is the value, in this case the date, See the screenshot at the bottom of the page for
that we want to format. The second argument, the results of these formulas.

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42 | Journal of Accountancy July 2022