This is similar to the Index + Match walkthrough as the Excel Efficiency lesson. If you happened to skip over that lesson, then this is a walkthrough how to use Index + Match and why it is useful to use over VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP.

This is the file we’ll be using for this lesson.

In this lesson, you will begin to create a dynamic Excel template using Excel VBA. Throughout the videos, you will build step-by-step until you have a program that saves each template as a PDF file, then creates emails with attachments.

In the template we will use the function DATEDIF. This is an undocumented formula in Excel, meaning that if you type out DATEDIF, Excel will appear to not recognize it as a formula. However, you can add parentheses after DATEDIF. The first argument is the starting date, the second argument is the ending date, and the last argument is the difference you want to return (i.e. difference in days, weeks, months, years, etc.). The difference units are:

“Y“

The number of complete years in the period.

“M“

The number of complete months in the period.

“D“

The number of days in the period.

“MD“

The difference between the days in start_date and end_date. The months and years of the dates are ignored. Microsoft doesn’t recommend using the “MD” argument, as there are known limitations with it.

“YM“

The difference between the months in start_date and end_date. The days and years of the dates are ignored

“YD“

The difference between the days of start_date and end_date. The years of the dates are ignored.

Further DATEDIF documentation may be found here.