While the cell is selected, press Ctrl+ (semicolon) to add today’s date in the cell. Just make sure that you enter the initial date in a proper format that Excel recognizes.ĭid you find this automation useful? Do you have additional tips that can help in this area? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.In the spreadsheet, click the cell in which you want to display today’s date. Rather than inserting each date manually, you can have years’ worth of dates filled in mere seconds. Hopefully, these tips will help you save a lot of time when working with complex worksheets. To update these cells without reopening your worksheet, simply edit any cell and the values will update.

To update the cell value with both the current date and time, type =NOW().

To always have the current date in a cell, type =TODAY().

If you need the date and time to change every time you open the document, Excel solves this with the following functions: As a timestamp, they won’t change after you recalculate your cells or when you open the sheet on another occasion. This way, you will keep the date and time the same as when they were first set.

To enter both the current date and time, press Ctrl+ then Space and finally Ctrl+Shift+.

To enter the current time, press Ctrl+Shift+.

Instead, you can use keyboard shortcuts to do the work for you: To quickly add current date and time in Excel, you don’t have to waste time typing them.

In the “Type:” field, right above the list of the suggested formats, you can type exactly how you’d like the date to appear. Here you can choose from one of the suggested formats or you can define your own. That’s because it is a default format which Excel uses. Notice that the selected category to the left is “Custom”.

The “Format Cells” menu will open, showing the “Number” tab.

Right click on the cell (or a selection of cells) you wish to format.

If you would like to see the date in another format, you can choose one from the settings menu. In all other cases, as listed in the previous section, the date will show up as “1-jul” in your sheet. If you have entered the month, day, and year as numbers (7-1-19 or 07-01-2019), Excel will display the date as “”.

Once you have properly entered the date, Excel will display it in one of the default formats. If you enter 7/1/19 and your settings are, for example, set to one of the European countries, Excel would understand that date as January 7, 2019.

That translates to the second figure as well. Please note that depending on the regional settings in your operating system, the first figure may indicate either a month or a day.

How do i insert current date in excel