Calculating a Sum for a Range of Dates

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated August 8, 2024)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365


Forrest has an Excel worksheet in which he logs flight hours. There are two primary columns: Column A is the date of the flight and column B is the number of hours flown for that particular flight. There can be multiple flights per day, so multiple rows per day. Forrest is continually adding rows to the flight log and he needs a way to calculate the number of hours flown over the last X days, where X could be 183 (6 months) or 365 (12 months).

There are all sorts of ways you could approach this problem, but there are actually a couple of simple formulas you could use to get the desired results. If, for instance, you wanted to determine the number of hours flown in the past 183 days, you could use the following formula:

=SUMIF(A:A,">="&(TODAY()-183),B:B)

You can, of course, change the 183 in the formula to 365 to get the hours for the past year. Or, you could simply change 183 to a cell reference (such as E1) and then put the desired number of days into that cell. The SUMIF function includes in its "summing" only those values that match some criteria that you specify. In this case, the criteria is that the dates in column A must be greater than or equal to 183 days before today.

You could also use the SUMIFS function to create a formula that may be equally as useful. The SUMIFS function allows you to test multiple criteria in determining what is summed. Assume, for a moment, that you had a starting date in cell G1 and an ending date in cell G2. You could then use the following formula to determine the number of hours flown between those two dates:

=SUMIFS(B:B,A:A,">="&G1,A:A,"<="&G2)

The formula only sums values in column B if the dates in column A are greater than or equal to your starting date (cell G1) and less than or equal to your ending date (cell G2).

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (10049) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

MORE FROM ALLEN

Returning Word to Default Settings

Want to set everything back to a pristine state in Word? Doing so is more involved than you may believe.

Discover More

Understanding Justification

Paragraphs can be aligned in four different ways. This tip examines those alignment methods.

Discover More

Adding Smart Quotes through Macro Text

When text is added to your document by a macro, and that text includes quotes or apostrophes, Word won't change the ...

Discover More

Professional Development Guidance! Four world-class developers offer start-to-finish guidance for building powerful, robust, and secure applications with Excel. The authors show how to consistently make the right design decisions and make the most of Excel's powerful features. Check out Professional Excel Development today!

More ExcelTips (ribbon)

Finding the Dates for Minimums and Maximums

If you use Excel to maintain a collection of data, you may need to find information in one column based on information in ...

Discover More

Using a Two-Character Day of the Week in a Date Format

Excel provides quite a bit of flexibility in how you can format dates. Even so, some dates simply cannot be formatted ...

Discover More

Advancing Dates to a New Year

If you store dates in your worksheets, you may want to update those dates at the end of the year. This tip explains ...

Discover More
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

View most recent newsletter.

Comments

If you would like to add an image to your comment (not an avatar, but an image to help in making the point of your comment), include the characters [{fig}] (all 7 characters, in the sequence shown) in your comment text. You’ll be prompted to upload your image when you submit the comment. Maximum image size is 6Mpixels. Images larger than 600px wide or 1000px tall will be reduced. Up to three images may be included in a comment. All images are subject to review. Commenting privileges may be curtailed if inappropriate images are posted.

What is 2 + 2?

There are currently no comments for this tip. (Be the first to leave your comment—just use the simple form above!)


This Site

Got a version of Excel that uses the ribbon interface (Excel 2007 or later)? This site is for you! If you use an earlier version of Excel, visit our ExcelTips site focusing on the menu interface.

Newest Tips
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

(Your e-mail address is not shared with anyone, ever.)

View the most recent newsletter.