Quickly Insert Current Date and Time into a Cell in Excel

This guide provides a practical overview of Quickly Insert Current Date and Time into a Cell, including its main features, benefits, limitations, and important considerations.

Shortcuts to fill the current date in Excel as static values

On a worksheet, select the cell you want to insert the current date or time.

Do one of the following:

To insert the current date, press Ctrl +; (semi-colon).

To insert the current time, press Ctrl + Shift +; (semi-colon).

To insert the current date and time, press Ctrl +; (semicolon), then press the Space key (space) and press Ctrl + Shift +; (semi-colon).

Example done on Excel spreadsheet:

Because the results are static, the value of the cell does not change when you reopen the Excel worksheet or perform the calculation.

How to fill current date in Excel as dynamic values

To automatically update the date, month and time according to the time of calculating / opening a worksheet; You use the TODAY or NOW functions with the function structure and use the following.

= TODAY (): This function will return the result as day, month, year of the current time.

= NOW (): The Now function returns the date and time of the current time.

Note: The two time functions above have no arguments.

Note:

1. The date and time are taken from the computer's system clock.
2. The date and time are automatically updated if you turn the file off and on or when the macro contains a function. If you leave the worksheet as is or click Save, the function does not automatically change the results.

How to fill a date range in ascending order by date

Similar to filling ordinal numbers, you can enter a date range in ascending order by: filling the first date in the first cell in Excel worksheet => Click in the first date cell and then drag the Fill Hand (the small square in the bottom right corner in the selected cell) to the right or bottom of all the cells you want to fill in the date.

Autofill date according to certain distance

Step 1: Fill the first day in any cell.

Step 2: Select the cell, right click on the fill handle , scroll down to the last cell you want to fill the date and release the mouse. (similar to how to create dates in ascending order by date, but right click on the fill hande button, not the left mouse button).

Step 3: When you release the mouse button, the Menu panel appears, select Series.

Step 4: In the Series dialog box, select the Date unit as you wish and enter the appropriate numbers into Step Value . After setup as desired, click the OK button to finish.

If you enter the parameter as shown in the image above, with the first day of October 16, 2019, the next day after that will be November 16, 2019.

Change the date or time format

To change the date or time format, select the cell you want to change, on the Home tab (1) , click the Number format box (2) to choose the format type, select the available format type (3) or click More Number formats. (4) to select the appropriate format.

Good luck!