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Sarzim's avatar
Sarzim
Occasional Reader
Sep 16, 2025

How to add 3 months to existing date mergefield in Word

I'm looking for a way to add 3 months on from an existing mergefield date («Calculation Date») in Word.

 

Say the starting date is 16 September 2025 we'd want the new value to be shown as 16 December 2025.

 

I cannot do this calculation in Excel as the mergefield data comes from a database and I have not used Macros etc before.

 

Thanks 

1 Reply

  • Charles_Kenyon's avatar
    Charles_Kenyon
    Bronze Contributor
    Sep 17, 2025

    See Paul Edstein's DateCalc tutorial.

    Microsoft Word Date Calculation Tutorial

    Be sure to read the introductory material. He has complex fields for different situations that you can copy and paste into your documents. Here you would use your initial mergefield as the starting point.

    Look at "Calculate a day, date, month and year, using n months delay" which I'm seeing on Page 8. It is in the Table of Contents, though.

    This has been my go-to source for many years when I need such a field.

    Do not try to type or create the following; instead copy the real Word field from Paul's tutorial into your document and edit it there.

    {QUOTE
    {SET Delay 9}
    {SET mm{=MOD(ABS({DATE \@ M}+Delay+11),12)+1}}
    {SET yy{=INT({DATE \@ yyyy}+(Delay+{DATE \@ M}-1)/12)}}
    {SET dd{=IF(({DATE \@ d}>28)*(mm=2)=1,28+((MOD(yy,4)=0)+(MOD(yy,400)=0)-(MOD(yy,100)=0)),IF((mm=4)+(mm=6)+(mm=9)+(mm=11)+({DATE \@ d}>30)>1,30,{DATE \@ d}))}}
    "{dd}-{mm}-{yy}" \@ "dddd, d MMMM yyyy"}

    You would change the delay from 9 months to 3 months and use your mergefield instead of the DATE field everywhere the DATE field is shown above.

    See also: How to type Fields in Microsoft Word and How to Toggle the Display of Field Codes in Word (my page).

     

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