How to calculate a future or due date in Excel easily

With the Excel spreadsheet you can make certain calculations that are believed impossible or, failing that, with a high level of complication.

This may persuade us not to carry out this project, but we can tell you that you are totally wrong. Read on to find out how simple and fast it can be to  easily calculate a future date or due date in Excel.

Performing these calculations is actually a very simple task, since we know in principle the start date and the duration of the same. Then it will be easy to establish what the end date will be.

Excel can represent a challenge for many users who are not very knowledgeable about formula and arithmetic calculations. For this reason it is important that you learn how to add and subtract dates , whether these days, months or years.

How to calculate a future or due date in Excel easily

In principle we are going to show you how to establish or calculate an end date, as we already mentioned if we already have the date present and we know how many days the project will take. Then with a simple sum the calculation can be made, in this example the formula will be like this = TODAY () + 14.

So that you can understand the formula we will break it down like this, the TODAY function will give us the current date and if we add the value that in this case is 14. Then we are going to obtain the future date that will be adding 14 days to the current date, and voila . You can complement your project and make an indicator semaphore in Excel with dates.

Steps to calculate a future or due date in Excel easily

You can try this formula with different start dates and duration and you will get different days in the future. As you will appreciate, this formula works perfectly and there is no way or way for it to fail. And surely you are wondering how it is possible that the Excel application can perform this calculation in such an easy way and with a basic formula.

Well the answer is very simple and is that Excel takes the complete date as a whole number and in this way we can add and subtract days in a date and Excel will calculate it without problems.

With this simple formula, you can easily calculate future dates that involve more days and even months, and in this way you can, for example, calculate the time between two dates.

So in this way the application will only add the integers that correspond to the date in the future. We are going to present this to you as an example, but it is applicable so that you can determine the possible date of birth of the baby. To do this we are going to make use of Naegle’s rule which states that the calculation is obtained in this way.

A year will be added to the date on which the woman had her last period, then three months will be subtracted and then you will add 7 days. In order to add a year we can put the value 365, but it is better to use the date functions. And for this, we are going to use the following formula = DATE (YEAR (A2) + 1, MONTH (A29, DAY (A2)

But the final formula where we must add a year, subtract 3 months and then add 7 days; then the formula should be as follows = DATE (YEAR (A2) +1, MONTH (A2) -3, DAY (A2) +7) if you apply this formula you will have a very approximate delivery date. And so in this way we finish this tutorial that taught you how to calculate a future date or due date in Excel easily.