Difference between dates

[Erika]

Hi, people. My excel is rusty and I need help.

I have a new project and I'm setting up tasks in a spreadsheet. I want
to have a date in the corner that is captioned: X (next cell: Days to
deadline). I googled but can't make the answers work right.

I tried this formula and get an error that says #NUM!
=DateDif(now(),11/1/2005,"d")

I can do it this way but it's stupid. Why waste space with a1 and a2?
=DateDif(a1,a2,"D")

What am I doing wrong? Thanks for the help!

 

[David McRitchie]

Hi Erika,
The safest way to specify a date in Excel is DATE(year,month,day)
then you have no trouble with other date formats outside US.

You will probably find examples at
http;//www.cpearson.com/excel/datedif.htm
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/datetime.htm
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/datetime.htm