How to Remove Year from Date in Excel

What this does

These three read one component out of a date serial number. MONTH returns 1–12, DAY returns 1–31, YEAR returns the four-digit year. The single most common surprise is that MONTH returns a number: to get a month NAME you need =TEXT(A2, "mmmm") for January or "mmm" for Jan, and TEXT returns text, so the result sorts alphabetically rather than chronologically. That is why a report grouped by month name usually runs April, August, December unless the sort is done on the month number and only the display uses TEXT. The second thing worth knowing is that a "month and year" grouping key should not be built by concatenating MONTH and YEAR — =TEXT(A2,"yyyy-mm") gives a key that sorts correctly, and =EOMONTH(A2,0) gives a real date you can chart on a time axis. Finally, these functions need a genuine date: fed text like "03/04/2026" they return #VALUE!, which is the fastest way to discover an imported column never became dates at all. Most people learn this as a sequence of clicks and forget it by next week; learning it as a pattern instead is what lets you apply it to the next, slightly different version of the problem without starting from scratch. That is the difference this page is trying to make. Treat “remove year from date in excel” as a small repeatable workflow rather than a one-off click you hope to remember next time. Use a small test block before the live file, so any surprise in the affected cells shows up while it is still harmless. When a formula is involved, keep the inputs labelled beside it, reference cells instead of typing values, and apply number formatting only after the result checks out. That turns a workflow that saves repeating the same clicks every week into a method you can reuse, explain, and defend when the workbook leaves your screen.

A worked example

A2 holds 2026-08-14. =MONTH(A2) → 8, =YEAR(A2) → 2026, =DAY(A2) → 14. For a label rather than a number, =TEXT(A2,"mmmm") → August. For a grouping key that sorts properly, =TEXT(A2,"yyyy-mm") → 2026-08. To collapse a whole column to month starts for a PivotTable or chart, =EOMONTH(A2,-1)+1 → 2026-08-01. Almost every monthly report starts by splitting a date column into parts, and the two traps — numbers rather than names, and text keys that sort alphabetically — account for most of the wrong-looking summaries that follow. A practical tip before you scale it up: build it once on a small block of test data, confirm the number against the tool on this page, and only then point it at your real sheet. That one habit catches almost every mistake while it is still cheap to fix, long before a wrong figure reaches a report or a colleague.

In Google Sheets

Google Sheets handles this almost identically to Excel. The formula syntax above is the same, and the menu lives under a slightly different label rather than a ribbon tab. Use the platform toggle at the top of the page to switch every keyboard shortcut between Windows and Mac, and expect at most cosmetic differences in naming. Keep this page bookmarked for the next time the same question comes up. Better still, repeat the steps once in your own workbook — doing it yourself is what turns a copied answer into something you remember. Treat “remove year from date in excel” as a small building block rather than a chore. Once the inputs sit in their own cells and the formula reads from them, the same setup answers a dozen related questions with a tweak, and Excel keeps every dependent figure current as the data changes. The tool above is there so you can rehearse and verify before committing anything to a real workbook; the steps and worked example are there so the logic sticks. Get it right once and it stops costing you time — it starts saving it, every time the question comes back around.

Common mistakes

• Expecting MONTH to return "August" — it returns 8, and the name needs TEXT.
• Sorting or grouping on a TEXT month name, which orders April, August, December instead of chronologically.
• Building a month-year key as MONTH&YEAR, which makes 12026 for December and sorts nonsensically.
• Running these against text that merely looks like a date and reading #VALUE! as a formula problem rather than a data problem.
• Using =YEAR(TODAY())-YEAR(B2) as an age, which is wrong by up to a year — DATEDIF with "y" is the correct tool.

Frequently asked questions