If you need to extract the year from a date, you can use the YEAR function. In the generic form of the formula above, the date  must be in a form that Excel recognizes as a valid date.

How the formula works

The YEAR function takes just one argument, the date from which you want to extract the year. In the example, the formula is:

=YEAR(B4)

B4 contains a date value for January 5, 2016. The YEAR function returns the number 2016 representing the year of the date.

Note that you can use YEAR to extract the year from a day entered as text:

=YEAR("1/5/2016")

However, using text for dates can cause unpredictable results on computers using different regional date settings. In general it's better (and more flexible) to supply an address to a cell that already contains a valid date.

Display only year

If you want to enter a date and only display the year, you can apply a custom number format like "yyyy" or "yy".