Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. 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: Calculating the Day of the Year.
You've probably seen it on calendars before—some include an indication that "Today is the 123 day of the year with 242 remaining." You can easily calculate the day number of a year, as well as how many are remaining. For instance, let's assume you have a date in cell D27. You could use the following formulas to calculate, respectively, what day of the year it is and how many are still left:
=D27-"12/31/2017" ="12/31/2018"-D27
The reason that the first formula uses a date of 12/31/2018 is so the result will show the actual day number. Using these formulas, the result of 1/1/2018 in cell D27 would result in 1, meaning it is the first day of the year. (This is as it should be.)
Of course, once you enter the formulas, you need to format the cells as regular numbers. (Excel will, by default, try to format the cells as dates.) With the two cells selected, follow these steps:
Figure 1. The Number tab of the Format Cells dialog box.
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2018-08-06 14:25:13
D Dodge
A more generic formula not limited to 2018 would be:
=TODAY()-CONCAT("1/1/",YEAR(TODAY()))
This gives you the day number for today. Replace both TODAY() with a cell reference if you want the day number for a specific date in your spreadsheet.
The number of days remaining can also be year independent:
=IF(MOD(YEAR(TODAY()),4)=0,366-A1,365-A1)
where A1 is the cell containing the day of year number calculation. Again, replace TODAY() with a cell reference if a specific date other than today is used. As mentioned in the article, both cells need to be formatted as NUMBER with zero decimal points.
2018-08-05 10:29:46
Allen
Simon, you are correct. I changed the article to reflect 2018, as it should.
-Allen
2018-08-05 04:01:50
Simon Freeman
(A) Don't forget to change the date to 31/12/2017 in countries where dd/mm/yyyy is the norm.
(B) Shouldn't the date in the second formula be 12/31/2018 (not 2017) to get the days to the end of the year.
2018-08-04 06:53:20
Russell
=D27-Date(Year(D27),1,0)
would also work, and means you don't have to manually enter the year
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Copyright © 2018 Sharon Parq Associates, Inc.
Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. 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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