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Showing posts from September, 2017

How to calculate the quarter for a given date in Google Sheets

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Quarterly reporting is important for many businesses. While most spreadsheets can extract the day, date, month or year from a date with dedicated functions, none of them have  a built-in quarter() function .  In this article we will show you how you can easily get the quarter of the year from a date. 1. The month() function The month() function in Google Sheets gives you the month number from a date: if your cell A2 contains Sep-30 2017 or 9/30/2017, month(A2) will show "9". 2. A little math There are four quarters in a year with three months each. Month 1 is in Q1, month 5 is in Q2, month 6 is also in Q2, while month 7 is in Q3. The logic is simple enough that we want to automate this with some math. Here is the trick : if we know the month and divide the month by 3, we are almost there : We can see that March, June and December are in the right quarter number but for other months, the floating numbers are cause for concern. Well, not for long. 3. Rounding nu