Adding Days to a Date using the DATE Function in Google Sheets

There may be a number of situations that require you to add days to a date in your worksheet. You might want to add a certain number of days up to a delivery date or add a security period of a few days to a given date.

Another way in which you can add days to a date in Google Sheets is by using the DATE function. This method will be more complicated than the simple addition method explained in the previous section, but there might be cases where you may find this useful.

The method mainly involves breaking down your original date into month, day, and year and then adding the number of days you want to add to the number of days in the original date.

In other words, if you have a date, say, 06/05/2021 in cell A2, and you want to add 10 days to the date, the formula you will use is:

=DATE(YEAR(A2),MONTH(A2),DAY(A2)+10)
Let’s break this down:

The DATE function is used to specify a value in the DATE format. Thus, whenever you use this formula, your result will automatically get converted to the DATE format without you having to explicitly format it from the main menu.
The date function accepts 3 integer parameters: the year number, the month number, and the day number. So the date 06/05/2021 is represented as DATE(2021,05,06).
The YEAR function extracts the year value of the date in cell A2. So YEAR(A2) in this case will return 2021.
The MONTH function extracts the month value of the date in cell A2. So MONTH(A2) in this case will return 5.
Similarly, the DAY function extracts the day value of the date in cell A2. So DAY(A2) in this case will return 6. When you add 10 to this result, you get 6+10=16.
Finally, the DATE function combines these three parameters (2021,5,16) and returns the date 16/05/2021!
You might be curious as to why we need the MONTH and YEAR functions when we only want to add 10 days to the original date. The reason for this is that the format of the DATE function requires all three parameters to perform the calculation.

You can use this method to even add months and years to your date. So, if you want to add, say, 1 year, 2 months, and 10 days to a date, you can easily use this formula by adding 1 to the first parameter, 2 to the second and 10 to the third. Your formula would then become:

=DATE(YEAR(A2)+1,MONTH(A2)+2,DAY(A2)+10)
Here’s what you would get as the result:

add days to dates google sheets
Adding Days to the Current Date in Google Sheets
Finally, let us take a look at a situation where you want to always add a specific number of days, for example, 10 days, to the current date, depending on when the Google Sheets file is opened.

The TODAY function comes quite in handy when you need to use the current date, as per the local date and time settings on the user’s computer.

So every time the user opens the file, the date changes to the current local date of the user in the DATE format.

If you want to always calculate the date 10 days after the current local date, you can add the number of days to the TODAY function as follows:

=TODAY()+10
The TODAY function is dynamic or ‘volatile’, so it recalculates automatically every time.

admin January 3, 2022

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Adding Days to a Date using the DATE Function in Google Sheets

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