Read more: days to years
How to Read a Date
There are usually three parts to a date:
Day is the exact day of the month, like January 1st through December 31st.
Month: The month of the year, like January through December or 01 through 12.
Year: The four-digit number that stands for the year, like 2024.
Like this, this is what a full date might look like:
April 21, 2025
April 21, 2025
April 21, 2025 (ISO format)
The day, month, and year are in each version. But there are times when we only need the year—for example, when we’re looking at trends, grouping data, or when the month and day details don’t matter.
Why Change Years to Dates?
There are many times when you only need the year part:
Grouping Data: We often group data by year in financial records and when we admit new students.
Trend analysis: A company may want to look at yearly sales growth and not monthly changes.
Keeping only the years when full dates are not needed saves room and makes filing easier.
In this case, you might not care about the exact date when people signed up for your service as long as you know how many people did it each year.
How to Change a Date to a Year in Real Life
Converting dates to years is important in the following situations:
1. Schooling
Colleges often write down the year that someone graduated or got into the school, even if they have the exact date in their files. To look at changes in enrollment over decades, only the year is taken out of full numbers.
2. Money
When you study the stock market, you often look at how things did each year. To make year-over-year charts, analysts turn transaction or price-recording times into years.
3. Information about customers
The year of birth, which is shorter than the full date of birth, is used by marketing teams to divide people into age groups without using the full date.
How to Change a Date to a Year
1. In Excel
It’s easy to get the year out of Excel:
Let’s say cell A1 has a date (April 21, 2025).
Type in the number:
Copy and paste in Excel =YEAR(A1)
This will come back in 2025.
2. In Python
A lot of people also use Python and the datetime module:
Python: Copy and paste from datetime import datetime
“2025-04-21” is the date string.
Date_str.strptime(date_str, “%Y-%m-%d”) returns date_obj.
year = date_obj.year
print(year) # 2025 comes out
3. In SQL
When it comes to databases, especially SQL queries:
Copy and paste the following SQL code: SELECT EXTRACT(YEAR FROM order_date) AS order_year FROM orders; This helps make reports that group records by year.
4. By hand
You can read a date and write down the year by hand, even if you don’t have any tools or computer knowledge. In this case, “March 5, 2019” makes it clear that the year is 2019.
Problems We Face Often
It’s easy to change times to years, but there may be some problems:
Different Date Formats: Dates can be stored in different ways based on the system or area, like MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY. This can be confusing if the formats aren’t standardized.
Text Values vs. Date Values: Dates are sometimes saved as strings of text, and programs like Excel and SQL might not be able to read them until they are written correctly.
Dates That Are Null or Incomplete: Dates That Are Null or Incomplete can cause mistakes during change and need to be cleaned up.
Conclusion
Changing a date to a year is an easy but useful action that is used to work with data, make reports, and do analysis. You can group data more seriously and get more general insights if you only look at the year. It’s useful to know when and how to change a full date into a year, whether you’re a student working on a project, a data expert making reports, or someone who is keeping their personal records in order.
