Entering date and time in Excel spreadsheets can be a time-consuming process, but it doesn’t have to be. In this short Excel tutorial, we’ll show you a couple of tips to quickly enter today’s date and time into your spreadsheets.
Firstly, we’ll look at how to enter today’s date with a simple formula. All you need to do is use the formula “=today()” and every time you open the spreadsheet, it will display the current date. However, sometimes you might not want the date to change every time you open the spreadsheet. For instance, if you have a list of employees and their hire date, you wouldn’t want the hire date to change every time you open it up. In this case, you can use the shortcut of typing the month forward slash and then the day, leaving the year off, and tapping enter on the keyboard.
But, we have an even faster way to do this. Simply click on a particular cell, hold the ctrl key and then tap semicolon. This will automatically put whatever today’s date is right into that cell that is selected. Then, tap enter on the keyboard and you’re ready to move on.
What if the time that Jennifer was hired was also important? All you have to do is hold ctrl, hold shift, and then tap semicolon and it puts in the current time. It’s important to note that these dates and times do not update or change unless you click on them and type over them.
These tips on how to enter date and time in Excel can save you a lot of time and effort. If you found this tutorial helpful, please consider connecting with us on social media and subscribing to our YouTube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students.