How to join dates to get date range in Excel

In this article, we will learn How to join dates to get a date range in Excel.

Scenario:

At Instance, we need to get the date values as date ranges. Either we do it manually one by one, which could be hectic. The problem occurs as Excel stores date values as numbers. So if we directly concatenate or join 2 dates as shown below. Some unknown numbers appeared as text values.

The resulting range is not in type of required format. So we will use the below explained formula to get the date as range in required format in excel

How to solve the problem?

Here, we use the following char or function to join the dates:

1. TEXT function
2. & (char)
3. CONCATENATE function

The above stated & (char) and the CONCATENATE function does the same work. So you can use any one of these. TEXT function returns the date as text value with the type of format you require as date range. Observe the below formula.

Generic formula:

start_date : range start date

end_date : range end date

format : type of format

Example :

All of these might be confusing to understand. Let's check the formula via running some examples. Here we have different columns as dates and one column will be the results using the formula.

Use the formula:

Explanation:

1. TEXT function returns the date value with mentioned format pattern.
2. & (char) joins the start_date , " - " and end_date.

Here the date and format is provided to the formula as shown in the image above. Press Enter to get the date range. 

Here the format selected for the date range is mm/dd/yyyy, you can customize it to any format. I took some different formats like "mmmm yyyy", "mmmm, dd" , "dd/mm/yy", etc. as shown below.

As you can see the formula extracts the date range using the & (char) in excel. In E7 cell, there is a date range having end date before the start date. So check the start_date and end date in the formula. You can tackle the same problem using the CONCATENATE function separated by commas as argument.

Here are all the observational notes regarding using the formula. 

Notes :

1. TEXT function returns value as text and can be used with custom numbers format.
2. Format as argument be given with quotation marks.

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