Month from a range of dates

**awdms6** · 06-11-2010, 12:02 PM

I need some help with this. What I'm trying to do is this: I have two columns of info, one has the actual ship date and the other has the ship month. The problem that I'm having is that the ship month doesn't correspond with the actual date. For example, Our ship month for June ranges from June 13th to July 11th. So the cell that has the ship date would be entered like this: 7/4/10 and I want the other cell to show the actual ship month of June.

Is there a way to have a cell populate a month based on the range of dates that are entered.

Thanks

**Bob Phillips** · 06-11-2010, 12:16 PM

Okay, that is fine for June, but what are the ship dates for July. Obviously 12th July, but Agust the what, 11th, 12th? You need some hard and fast rule.

**ChemistB** · 06-11-2010, 12:25 PM

See if this works for you. You'll need to make a table with the first column being the initial date for that shipping month (i.e. 6/13/2010) and the second column being the shipping month. Then use a VLookup

=VLOOKUP(A5,$J$3:$K$14,2)

Does that work for you?

**awdms6** · 06-11-2010, 04:41 PM

Originally Posted by Bob Phillips

Okay, that is fine for June, but what are the ship dates for July. Obviously 12th July, but Agust the what, 11th, 12th? You need some hard and fast rule.

Yeah I wanted someone to commit to a rule but the dates are determined by someone with a better office than me (if you know what I mean).

ChemistB's formula seems like it is what I need though.

**awdms6** · 06-11-2010, 04:51 PM

Originally Posted by ChemistB

See if this works for you. You'll need to make a table with the first column being the initial date for that shipping month (i.e. 6/13/2010) and the second column being the shipping month. Then use a VLookup

=VLOOKUP(A5,$J$3:$K$14,2)

Does that work for you?

Thanks a lot, this formula seems like its working just fine.

So I want to make sure that I learn and understand it, and not just copying your work.

So the VLOOKUP looks at the data in that first cell ex.A5 then looks vertically from J3 all the way down to see where it fits in and compares that to the vertical row at K down to 14. So what does the 2 represent in the formula.

Thanks again for your help.

**ChemistB** · 06-14-2010, 09:28 AM

You have it pretty much correct. What happens is that the formula trys to match the value in A5 to a value in the first column (J) of the table J3:K14. The 2 tells the formula that when it finds a match (without going over), return the value for column 2 (K). Hope that makes sense.