How to get the year, month, or day from a date
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3Split a date into its parts — for grouping by year, filtering by month, or rebuilding dates.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel | =YEAR(A2) | MONTH(A2) gives 1-12, DAY(A2) gives 1-31. DATE(y,m,d) reassembles them. |
| Google Sheets | =YEAR(A2) | Identical. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =YEAR(A2) | Identical. |
How it works
YEAR, MONTH, and DAY each return a plain number from a date (the verification packs all three into 20260723 to prove each one). They're the building blocks for grouping (sum by year), conditions (MONTH(A2)=7), and date surgery — e.g. "same day next year" is DATE(YEAR(A2)+1,MONTH(A2),DAY(A2)). If they return #VALUE!, your "date" is text — convert it first (see the convert-text-to-date recipe).
Verified, not just documented
We ran =YEAR(DATE(2026,7,23))*10000+MONTH(DATE(2026,7,23))*100+DAY(DATE(2026,7,23)) in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned 20260723 — exactly the expected result. Every formula here is confirmed by actually executing it.