Step 19 of 40 - Calculate Days Old

In this step you will create a Days Old column that returns the age of the invoice as of 5/31/2022.

Excel stores dates as the number of days that have elapsed since December 31, 1899, which means that Excel treats January 1, 1900 as day 1. The DATE function enables you to create the serial number version of any date by providing three arguments:

year - the year portion of a date, which can either be an input, cell reference, or the result of the YEAR function, which returns the year portion of a date.

month - the month portion of a date, which can either be an input, cell reference, or the result of the MONTH function, which returns the year portion of a date.

day - the day portion of a date, which can either be an input, cell, reference, or the result of the DAY function, which returns the year portion of a date.

MONTH, DAY, and YEAR all have a single serial_number argument through which you reference cell that contains a date or enter a calculation that returns a date.

The IF function has three arguments:

• logical_test - a calculation that evaluates to TRUE or FALSE

• value_if_true - an optional argument that will return an amount or calculation if the logical_test returns TRUE

• value_if_false - an optional argument that will reutrn an amount or calculation if the logical_test returns FALSE

In this case the logical_test determines if F2="", where "" represents an empty string or blank cell. The logical_test will return TRUE if if cell F2 is blank or FALSE if cell F2 is not blank. If the logical_test returns TRUE, two double-quotes make cell L2 appear blank, otherwise the function subtracts the value in cell E2, which is the invoice date, from the result of DATE(2022,5,31), which is equivalent of 5/31/2022, which means the formula returns the age of the invoice as of 5/31/2022.