This article illustrates how using Excel date shortcut makes dealing with dates in Excel easier. While making reports, budgets, calendars, and project planning, working with dates can be intimidating. But knowing the necessary tools and techniques would definitely save your time and labor.
8 Useful Shortcuts to Work with Date in Excel
Let’s follow the article and practice of your own to master the shortcuts illustrated with steps and screenshots. Here’s an overview:
1. Use of Date Shortcut to Enter Dates in Excel
There are two types of dates in Excel.
Static Dates
Date values that don’t change or update while calculations are static dates.
1.1 Static Current Date
Follow the steps to get the static current date.
Steps:
- Select the cell you want to store the current date.
- Press Ctrl +; (Semi-Colon) on your keyboard.
- Then press Enter.
This will put the static current date in the selected cell.
1.2 Static Current Date with Time
The following procedure will provide both the static current date and the time.
Steps:
- Select the cell that is going to store the current date & time.
- Press Ctrl +; (Semi-Colon) + space + Ctrl + Shift + ;( Semi-Colon) on your keyboard.
- Then press Enter.
As a result, we’ll get the static current date with static time in the selected cell.
Read More: How to Use IF Formula with Dates
Dynamic Dates
Another type of date, which keeps updating while performing calculations are the dynamic date. We can use Excel Functions to get this of dates.
1.3 Dynamic Current Day Using the TODAY Function
Let’s do the following example using the TODAY function
Steps:
- Select the cell you want to store the dynamic current date.
- Type the function in the selected The function is,
=TODAY ()- Then press Enter.
This will put the dynamic current date in the selected cell.
1.4 Dynamic Current Day & Time Using the NOW Function:
The following illustration will provide the dynamic current day and time by using the NOW function.
- Select the cell you want to store the dynamic current date and time.
- Type the function in the selected The function is,
=NOW ()- Then press Enter.
The result is the dynamic current date with the current time in the selected cell.
2. Changing Formats of Dates Using Keyboard Shortcuts
2.1 Finding the Day-Month-Year Clearly Using Keyboard Shortcut
Many times we need to import data in Excel that contains date values in different formats like mm-dd-yyyy or dd-mm-yyyy etc. We can apply the following shortcut to turn the date into a day-month-year format like 01 Jan 2022 which is easily understandable.
Steps:
- Select the date containing cell.
- Press Ctrl + Shift + # (Hash-tag ) on your keyboard.
2.2 Converting Date into Serial Number
Microsoft Excel stores date values as a sequential serial number which is required to make calculations related to dates. We can turn a date into a serial number with this keyboard shortcut.
Steps:
- Select the cell that contains the date.
- Press Ctrl + Shift + ~ (Tilde) on your keyboard.
2.3 Applying Custom Format to Date Using Shortcut in Excel
For custom formatting a date, we can open the Format Cells window by pressing Ctrl + 1 and then select our desired format.
Read More: How to Add Time in Excel Automatically
3. Find Out Year, Month, Day of a Date Using Excel Date Shortcut
As we discussed earlier, Excel stores dates as a sequential serial number that is understandable to the system. We can have dates that are stored as serial numbers. But we need to know it in a human-readable format. Let’s find out the year, month, and day of a date that is stored as a serial number.
- Put =YEAR (serial number) to get the year.
- Enter =MONTH (serial number) to get the month.
- Type =DAY (serial number) to get the day.
Read more: How to Copy Same Date in Excel
Things to Remember
While importing data from different sources don’t forget to check the format of the cell. Sometimes it may happen, the date is in text format. As a result, it looks like a range of dates but no operation can be done on those dates.
Download the Practice Workbook
Download this practice workbook to exercise while you are reading this article.
Conclusion
Now, we know the shortcuts keys to use date in Excel. Hopefully, it would encourage you to use this functionality more confidently. Any questions or suggestions don’t forget to put them in the comment box below
