J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

Calculating Easter

Easter is one of the most difficult holidays to calculate. Several years ago, a Web site had a contest to see who could come up with the best formula to calculate the date of Easter for any year. Here's one of the formulas submitted (it assumes that cell A1 contains a year):

=DOLLAR(("4/"&A1)/7+MOD(19*MOD(A1,19)-7,30)*14%,)*7-6

Just for fun, I calculated the date of Easter for 300 years from 1900 through 2199. Then I created a pivot table, and grouped the dates by day. And then, a pivot chart:

During this 300-year period, the most common date for Easter is March 31 (it occurs 13 times on that data). The least common is March 24 (only one occurrence). I also learned that the next time Easter falls on April Fool's Day will be in 2018.

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In particular, the user interface for Excel 2007 (and later), is vastly different from its predecessors. Therefore, the menu commands listed in older tips, will not correspond to the Excel 2007 (and later) user interface.

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Needs tips? Here are two books, with nothing but tips:

Contains more than 200 useful tips and tricks for Excel 2007 | Other Excel 2007 books | Amazon link: John Walkenbach's Favorite Excel 2007 Tips & Tricks

Contains more than 100 useful tips and tricks for Excel 2013 | Other Excel 2013 books | Amazon link: 101 Excel 2013 Tips, Tricks &Timesavers