Calculate Easter Date with Excel Formula

Easter will be here soon, and if you want to know exactly (“eggsactly”?) when it is, you can calculate Easter’s date with an Excel formula or User Defined Function. See the example below, and there’s a sample file you can download too, with several Easter formulas and functions. Oh, and there’s cake!

When is Easter?

It’s easy to figure out when Christmas is, or New Year’s Day, but Easter is a trickier date to calculate. It doesn’t fall on a specific date each year, or the 4th Thursday in a specific month, like other holidays.

Instead, Easter is on the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon. That sounds simple enough, but there’s a whole Wikipedia page on how to calculate that full moon! And there’s another Wikipedia page on Easter date calculations – it has history notes, tables, calendars, and algorithms.

No wonder we need chocolate as a reward, after figuring all of that out!

Easter Date in Excel

Fortunately, you don’t have to read all of those details on calculating the full moon dates or Easter dates.

There’s an Excel Easter Calculation page on my Contextures site, where Jerry Latham explains how you can calculate Easter dates in Excel.

That page has:

several worksheet formulas for Easter date calculations
4 different Excel User Defined Functions (UDFs)

List of Easter Dates

In the screen shot below, there’s a list of upcoming Easter dates. I created that list in Excel, using one of Jerry’s UDFs, named CalculateEaster.

This is the formula in cell C5, and copied down to the remaining rows in the table.

=calculateeaster(B5)

Get the Easter Date Workbook

To see the User Defined Function code, and the Excel worksheet formulas, go to the Excel Easter Calculation page on my Contextures site.

You can copy the code and formulas from that page, and paste them into your own workbook.

Or,download the Excel Easter Calculation sample file, which has all the code and formulas. The zipped Excel file is in xlsm format, and there are macros in the workbook. Be sure to enable the macros if you want to test the code.

Enjoy an Easter Dinner

If all of that calculation sounds exhausting, just look at your wall calendar, and see when Easter falls this year.

Save your energy for cooking a tasty Easter dinner – you can use my Excel Holiday Dinner Planner to figure out the timeline.

Make an Easter Cake

You can’t make this Easter cake in Excel, but here’s my daughter Sarah, long ago, ready to eat this fancy Easter bunny cake.

I baked 2 round white cake layers, then cut one in half, to make the bunny ears.
The decoration was white icing, sprinkled with coconut
A bit of coloured icing for the ears, nose, mouth and eyes.

And that was the pinnacle of my cake decorating career!

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