What’s today’s date? What time is it? Did you have to look at your calendar and clock?

Data entry in Excel can be tedious enough. You are updating your Excel table with the time and date of your most recent call to a customer, you want to be fast and not type the date and time manually.

Instead, insert today’s date or the current time in Excel, using a shortcut.

Insert current time and date with a keyboard shortcut

In a cell, press

CTRL+ ; (semicolon) to insert the current date

CTRL + : (colon) to insert the current time

 

Insert the current date or time inside text too

It works inside text too!

While I have been using this for many years, only recently and by accident did I discover that I could use the shortcut to insert the date/time anywhere inside some other text. Handy, eh?

e.g., in a cell type “This report was updated on ” then press CTRL + ;

 

Prefer to use a function? TODAY and NOW functions

You may already use =Today() and =Now() to always display the current date and time in a workbook. These however will refresh every day/time the workbook is saved.

 

Go on, try it.