When working with dates in Google Sheets, an integral part of data analysis might involve extracting specific components of the date such as the year, day, or month. In this blog post, we will examine how to retrieve the month from a date in Google Sheets.
The MONTH Function
Google Sheets provides a range of inbuilt functions which make it easy to work with dates. One such function is the MONTH function, which extracts the month from a given date and returns it as a number between 1 (representing January) and 12 (representing December).
The syntax for the MONTH function is relatively straightforward:
=MONTH(date)
Here, date is the cell reference containing the date from which you want to extract the month.
Example
Let’s see an example to understand how this works. Assume we have a date “3/15/2021” in cell A1, and we want to extract the month from this date. We would use the MONTH function as follows:
=MONTH(A1)
This formula will return 3, representing the third month of the year, March.
Formatting the Output
The MONTH function will only return the numerical representation of the month. However, in some cases, you might want the name of the month instead of the number. To achieve this, you can use the TEXT function in Google Sheets.
The TEXT function takes a numeric value (in our case, the result of the MONTH function) and a format pattern and turns the numeric value into text in the specified format.
Here’s how to format the month:
=TEXT(A1, "mmmm")
This formula will return March, representing the month of the date in cell A1. The “mmmm” format pattern returns the full name of the month. If you want a shortened version, you could use “mmm” to get “Mar”.
Conclusion
Extracting the month from a date in Google Sheets is quite straightforward using the MONTH and TEXT functions. These built-in functions provide a simple and efficient way to handle dates in your data analysis. Understanding how they work will make your work in Google Sheets much easier and more productive.
Be sure to check out other tutorials on our blog to further enhance your Google Sheets proficiency!
