Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, and 2013. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Days Left in the Year.
Do you ever need to figure out how many days are left in the current year? Since Excel stores dates as serial numbers—making them easy to subtract—it is easy to put together a formula that will return the number of days left in the year:
=DATE(YEAR(C12),12,31)-C12
This formula assumes that the date you want to analyze is in cell C12. It uses the DATE function to calculate the serial number for the last day of the year (December 31), and then subtracts the serial number for the actual date. The result is the difference—the number of days—between the two dates.
If you want to find the days left in the year from today, you don't need to put a date into a cell. You could use this formula:
=TEXT(DATE(YEAR(TODAY()),12,31)-TODAY(),0)
These formulas return a value that is formatted as a date. You will need to format the cell to a regular numeric value instead of a date in order to view the result correctly.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (6147) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, and 2013. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Days Left in the Year.
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, and 2013. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: 
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