How to Use Excel's MONTH Function

1. Learn the syntax of MONTH. It is MONTH (start_date) where start_date is the date for which you are trying to find the month.
2. Enter start_date using the DATE function or some other function that returns a date to prevent the problems that can occur when a date is entered as text. For example, DATE(2007,4,12) would be used for April 12, 2007.
3. Observe that Excel uses serial numbers internally to store dates. This is a number that represents the number of days beginning from a default date. Windows uses January 1, 1900, as serial number 1 and Excel for the Macintosh uses January 2, 1904, as serial number 1.
4. Examine the return values for the MONTH function. Excel returns the integers 1 to 12, representing the months in the Gregorian calendar, regardless of the display format of serial_number.
5. Study some examples of MONTH by entering 17-Apr-2008 as a date in cell A2. Example 1: =MONTH(A2) will return 4 because April is the fourth month of the year. Example 2: =MONTH(DATE(2007,3,12) will return 3. Note the use of the DATE function to ensure the argument for MONTH is in date format when entering it directly.