Extract part of a string

[kinikisu]

I am hoping someone out there knows an efficient way to do this:

I have a very large project, part of which entails documenting when expenses are paid then displaying monthly totals. The problem I have is I have no way of knowing when the bill will get paid until the actual invoice comes.

I need to have minimal data entry and am trying to get as much to auto fill as possible.

Here's what I want to do:

User enters date invoice is paid (3/17/2007)
function extracts the month (march=3 etc.) and displays the name of the month.

Question: what's the best function to use to do this and what is the syntax?

on a separate sheet, the totals for each month are summed and displayed which I can do myself.

[jasoncw]

You could just use the same date that is input, and custom format as mmmm, which will display the full month name.

[daddylonglegs]

Or you could use this formula in another cell where your date is in A1

=TEXT(A1,"mmmm")