Arithmetic operators are used to perform arithmetic on numbers (or strings).

Return Values

Arithmetic Operators return either a NUMBER or DATE. 

Notes

For numbers, the order in which they appear does not matter. For example;

3 + 2 = 5 will return the same as 2 + 3 

With dates, only certain orders are allowed, for example;

Date + Number is valid, and number is treated as days.

Number + Date is not valid and will fail.

Date1 + Date2 is not valid and will fail.

Date1 – Date2 is valid and will return the number of days between Date1 and Date2 as a negative integer (assuming Date1 is chronologically earlier than Date2) . 

Date2 – Date1 is valid and will return the number of days between Date1 and Date2 as a positive integer (assuming Date1 is chronologically earlier than Date2). 

Date – Number is valid, and will return the date which precedes Date by the given Number of days.

Number – Date is not valid and will fail.

Example

Calculating overspend on a story that has attributes “Cost” and “Budget”

Cost-Budget

Finding an item’s duration in days

end-start

Returning the days of the week

(start-DATE(2019,11,20))%7

This calculation will return a value between 0 – 6, where 0 will be same day (for example, a Monday) as the date specified in the function. Then will return a 1 for a day which is the day after the function date, so if the function date was a Monday (every Monday following will return a 0), and the date returned was a Tuesday, the function will return a 1, or a 2 for a Wednesday and so on.