Macro for Month Name

Brian is looking for a macro that returns the full name of the current month, such as July, August, etc. Before getting to the macros, it should be mentioned that depending on your needs, you can get the desired information with one of several formulas. Perhaps the easiest formula is the following:

=Today()

Place the formula into a cell, and you end up with today's date. Format the cell using a custom format, and you end up with the full month name. The custom format is applied by using these steps:

1. Select the cell containing the formula.
2. Choose Cells from the Format menu. Excel displays the Format Cells dialog box.
3. Make sure the Number tab is displayed.
4. In the list of format categories, select Custom. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Number tab of the Format Cells dialog box.

5. In the Type box, enter mmmm.
6. Click OK.

Another formulaic approach is to use the following in a cell:

=Text(Today(),"mmmm")

No special formatting is required; the formula returns the text of the full month name for whatever today is. Finally, you could use an even longer formula that simply picks the month name from a list of months:

=CHOOSE(MONTH(NOW()),"January","February",
"March","April","May","June","July",
"August","September","October","November",
"December")

Remember that this is a single formula; it goes all in one cell.

Which brings us, finally, to the macros. If you want a macro that returns the month name in the current cell, you are looking for a user-defined function:

Function MonthName()
    Application.Volatile
    MonthName = Format(Date, "mmmm")
End Function

This simple two-line macro dynamically returns the month name for whatever the current date is. Just put this formula in a cell:

=MonthName()

Remember—since you've just added a macro to your workbook, you'll be asked whenever you open your workbook if you want to enable macros. If you don't want to see this question all the time, you should use one of the formulaic approaches presented earlier.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2915) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Macro for Month Name.