YEAR in Excel

When you work in Excel, you’ll often find yourself working with date values. These include years, months, days, and more. It can be helpful to display a year value in a cell of its own. Fortunately, this is very easy to do in Excel. Let’s learn how to use YEAR in Microsoft Excel.

How to Use YEAR in Excel

Consider a list of dates: 6/5/08, December 17, 2020, and so forth. Although these are formatted differently, they share a key feature: both contain a year value. You might find yourself needing to list only the year value in a separate cell.

Of course, for a small number of cells, you could easily type the years into different cells manually. But imagine a list of hundreds or thousands of dates. The manual process would be very time-consuming, and also error-prone. This is where Excel’s YEAR function comes in.

YEAR, in essence, reads date values in Excel and places them in separate cells. To use YEAR, click into any empty cell in your workbook. Type an = sign, followed by YEAR(, starting your formula as follows:

=YEAR(

Then, click into any cell containing a date value. For example, we’ll use cell A1 here. Close your parentheses, concluding your formula as:

=YEAR(A1)

Now, you can hit Enter on your keyboard. Excel will place the year contained in the selected cell in your new cell. From here, you can easily click and drag to copy the formula downward to capture additional year values.

As you can see, Microsoft Excel’s YEAR function makes it easy to process date information. You can use it to quickly list the years found in a given dataset. Try it out next time you’re working with date information and need to perform analysis tasks on the year values inside. Thanks to Excel, it’s quick and easy to do exactly that when you use the YEAR function.