Showing a decline in Date/Month based on previous cell

In Cell A1 I am using the current date function =NOW()
I am formatting it to show JANUARY-2014 (mmmm-yyyy)

In Cell A2,A3,A4 etc, I want to show the previous cell minus one month, basically have it show A2 to show, DECEMBER-2013, A3 to show NOVEMBER-2013 etc.

I found that something simple as =A1-1 would not work

Thanks for any help.

Nick

in A3

=EDATE(A2,-1)

and drag it down

	A
2	December-2013
3	November-2013
4	October-2013

Format cell as Custom, mmmm-yyyy

I found that something simple as =A1-1 would not work

to understand why this did not workm you need to understand how excel treats dates. A date in excel is nothing more than a value of x-days from 1/1/1900. So although excel displays today's date as 1/25/2014, behind that it just 41664

So adding 1 to that will take it to 41665, which formats to 1/26/2014

Also, if you only wantthe date, I would use =TODAY(), not =NOW(). =TODAY() returns just today's date, but =NOW() returns the date and time

Happy to help, and thanks for the feedback

You're welcome and thank you for your feedback!

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