How to add days to a date in Excel

Sometimes we have to handle the data which consists of various dates while working in Excel. One such situation can happen when you have to track the days your team worked on a particular task. You might also want to inform your team about the deadlines of the tasks. In such situations we need to manipulate the dates data by adding or subtracting days to a particular date.

Excel allows you to add days to a certain date in a very simple way. Let’s take an example data set, shown above, and add some number of days in dates.

Let’s see how we can use Excel’s built-in calculations to find a solution to our problem by following these Methods;

• Use Simple Addition to add days
• Use DATE formula to add days

Method 1: Adding Days to Dates by Simple Addition

Let’s follow the steps described below to add days to the dates by using simple addition.

Step 1 – Use simple addition to add days to a particular date:

• Choose a suitable cell where you wish to implement the formula. In our example it is C2.
• Use the following formula in that cell and press enter key.

= A2 + B2 (simple addition formula)

• By default when you add a number to any cell’s value which is formatted as a date, Excel will automatically add the new number to the days, as shown in the picture below;

So by using simple addition we added 2 days to the first date. We can drag down the formula to extend it to the whole data set.

Method 2: Use Date function to add days to a date

The syntax of date function is as follows,

=DATE(YEAR,MONTH,DAY)

This formula creates a date by using three parameters, YEAR, MONTH and DAY.  When the right parameters are provided we can create any date using this formula. Let’s see how to use it in the below steps.

Step 1 – Create the Date formula to add days to a date:

• Now we will use the Date formula to add the days in dates. For this go to any cell, let’s say D2.
• Use the following formula in that cell to add the days in dates and press enter key.

= DATE(YEAR(A2),MONTH(A2),DAY(A2)+B2)

• The above formula creates a new date by using the DATE function of Excel. This function requires Year, Month and Day to create a date. So we passed on the Year, Month and day of A2, which was our start date, and added the number of days from B2 to the days section of the formula. This will add the number from B2 to the days only.

Step 2 – Implement the formula and add days

• After writing the formula correctly, press enter. It will display the new date after adding 2 days to the start date just like it did in the previous step. 

• To extend the results to further down the rows drag the formula down till the last row as shown above.

So this is how you can use the DATE function to add days to a particular date.