Day of the Year

 

An easy formula that returns the day of the year for a given date. There's no built-in function in Excel that can do this.

1. To get the year of a date, use the YEAR function.

Year Function

2. Use the DATE function below to return January 1, 2016. The DATE function accepts three arguments: year, month and day.

Date Function

3. The formula below returns the day of the year.

Day of the Year in Excel

Explanation: dates and times are stored as numbers in Excel and count the number of days since January 0, 1900. June 23, 2016 is the same as 42544. January 1, 2016 is the same as 42370. Subtracting these numbers and adding 1 gives the day of the year. 42544 - 42370 + 1 = 174 + 1 = 175.

4. 2016 is a leap year. A leap year has 366 days. December 31st is the last day of the year. We can check this.

Last Day of the Year

5. Bonus. The formula below calculates the number of days in a year.

Number of Days in a Year

Conclusion: 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024 are leap years.