Logical Arguments not working in SharePoint calculated columns, please help!

Copper Contributor

Hi Everyone,

I am not able to use logical arguments in calculated columns in my list and I don't know what I'm doing wrong. 
First of all, I can't compare two dates. I have a column that is manually populated with a date (no time). I have tried to set up a calculated column to tell me if that date occurs in the past or not. IF(Column1Date<Now(),"YES","")
Sharepoint will return "YES" for every row, even when the date occurs in the past. 

Example with Now() in the formula: (today is 4/4)

ColumnDate1
-date format/no time
Calculated Column:
=IF([ColumnDate1]<Now(),"YES","")
4/1/2022YES
4/15/2022YES


Example where I tried comparing two columns instead of using Now() directly in the formula:

Column1Date

(date format, no time)

Calculated Column 
=NOW()

(date format, no time)

Calculated Column:
=IF([Column1Date]<[CalculatedColumn],"YES","")
4/1/20224/4/2022YES
4/15/20224/4/2022YES


I thought there must be something going on behind the scenes where the dates are being treated like numbers or converted into a strange format and it was causing the logical argument to fail, so I tried a workaround so that I could compare simple numbers rather than dates. In this case I wanted to determine if there's more than 7 days between two dates.

 

Example:

Column1Date

(manually entered date, in date format/no time)

Column2Date
(manually entered date, date format/no time)

CalculatedColumn1

=DATEDIF([Column2Date],[Column1Date],"D")

 

number format, 0 decimal places

CalculatedColumn2

=IF([CalculatedColumn1]>7,"YES","")

4/1/20224/4/20223YES
4/1/20224/20/202219YES


I don't know why the logical arguments in the "IF" formulas don't work. They just won't calculate correctly. What am I doing wrong?
At this point I have set up my list to use the third workaround (counting number of days between dates then determining if it's more than 7 days) and that's the more pressing issue, but I would really also like to know why I can't seem to compare dates directly either. 

0 Replies