It is too bad that we could not extract part of a day, but I guess that is what memories are. In Microsoft Excel we can take part of a date and extract it to use elsewhere. Why? If you want to sort dates in a funny way, say all the 1st day of the months together, then the 2nd s it can be difficult to accomplish.
By extracting the day into another column this is easy to do. Say the date is 1 January 2010 and is sitting happily in C4. The next cell is blank so I click into D4 and type
= Day (C4)
it will return 1. I can copy this down for the other and use that column to sort, hiding it if I would like.
There is so much more I can do with these functions. There are 3 of them, Month, Day and Year. They can be used on their own or nested (imbedded) within other functions to create extreemly powerful calculations.
An example is in a list of clients. I have the date they last ordered in a column. If I want to call a month later to find out how their order is I could add 30 days but this would not give me the date exactly one month in the future. By using the following calculation I can:
=Date ( Year (C4) , Month (C4) + 1, Day (C4) )
Then I could use conditional formating or auto filter to show all the dates since the last time I called, which hopefully I would know.
Katherine
