Calculating a Future Date

by Allen Wyatt (last updated March 30, 2013)

Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Calculating a Future Date.

If you are creating a macro to do some processing on a document, you may have a need to calculate a date at some point in the future. Using the VBA DateAdd function, this is quite easy. The function has the following syntax:

DateAdd(interval, number, startdate)

The original date that you begin with (typically today's date) is specified by the startdate argument. The interval argument indicates what you want to add to the startdate. For instance, if you want to add days, then interval would be the letter d. (This interval needs to be enclosed within quotes.) There are many different intervals you can specify:

Interval		Meaning
d		Day
ww		Week
m		Month
q		Quarter
yyyy		Year
y		Day of year
w		Weekday
h		Hour
n		Minute
s		Second

Finally, the number argument specifies how many intervals you want to add to the date.

As an example, let's suppose you wanted to know the date that was 90 days in the future. You could use the following:

dFutureDate = DateAdd("d", 90, Date)

When executed, dFutureDate contains the date that is 90 days after today.

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