Compare several dates in row and display the most recent date

[Mark2455]

First I am sorry if this has been asked previously but I could not find anything that helped me out.
I have a spreadsheet that is about 500 rows and part of it includes 8 columns representing the last 8 years. In some of the columns there are dates and others are blank. I want to compare all 8 cells in each of the 500 rows and then just enter the most recent date in a new cell. Some of the rows have no dates are all, some have a few dates and a few have dates in all 8 cells. It does not matter if the formula throws an error when it finds no date as the will indicate that task has never been completed in all 8 years.
I have this formula that I used to indicate when a task was last completed but it cannot look at all 8 cells in a row of course.
=DATEDIF(P2,TODAY(),"Y") & " Years, " & DATEDIF(P2,TODAY(),"YM") & " Months, " & DATEDIF(P2,TODAY(),"MD") & " Days"

This is probably a simple task for many of you but I have not been able to get anything to work.

Hope this makes sense.

Thank you,

Mark2455

 

[jtakw]

Hi,

Are the dates in the 8 Columns in ascending order from left to right?
And when you say "most recent date", does that mean the "latest date", or just the last Date that was entered but Not necessarily in "order"?

2 different formulas depending on your situation:

Book1
	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K
2	1/15/2012	3/15/2014	4/15/2013	8/15/2018	7/1/2016	3/1/2015	11/20/2017	6/30/2015		8/15/2018	6/30/2015
3
4			8/20/2017		1/31/2019		12/31/2018			1/31/2019	12/31/2018
Sheet599

Cell Formulas
Range	Formula
J2	=IF(MAX(A2:H2)=0,"",MAX(A2:H2))
K2	=IFERROR(LOOKUP(9.99999999999999E+307,A2:H2),"")

 

[Mark2455]

You nailed it with your first formula. =IF(MAX(A2:H2)=0,"",MAX(A2:H2))
Thanks so much for your help.
The columns are descending in order with A=2019, B=2018 and so on and the most recent date is the latest date as you suggested.

Regards,
Mark2455

 

[jtakw]

You're welcome, welcome to the forum.