Entering today’s date in Excel can be done a couple of ways. It depends on whether you want the cell to always show the current day’s date or whether you want to capture today’s date so that it doesn’t change.

Dynamic Date

The function to have a dynamic date that always displays the current date is

=TODAY()

You can of course easily amend it as follows

Yesterday’s date

=TODAY()-1

Tomorrow’s date

=TODAY()+1

Some other automatic dates are

The first day of the current month

=DATE(YEAR(TODAY()),MONTH(TODAY()),1)

The last day of the current month

=DATE(YEAR(TODAY()),MONTH(TODAY())+1,0)

There is another function that returns today’s date

=NOW()

Note: this returns the date and time. Time is treated as a fraction of a day in Excel, so 0.5 is noon and 0.75 is 6PM.

When working with dates you would commonly use the TODAY function rather than the NOW function.

Data Entered Date

If you need to enter the date in a cell and not have the cell change, you can use a keyboard shortcut. Ctrl + ; (semi-colon) will enter today’s date in a cell.

There is also a keyboard shortcut to format a cell as a date Ctrl + Shift + #.

See another blog post on dates here.