Instantly enter today's date or time

Many Excel users find themselves typing today's date throughout the course of a day. Save some time. Press control+;. You'll get today's date. At the time of this recording, it's March 8, 2016 and complete the entry with Return. If you want to put in the current time, and you can see to the right, there are two different keystroke shortcuts, control+shift+;, that certainly works, or command+;. Both of those put in the current time, and Enter. These will never change. It's just a shortcut for typing in each case.

If you'd like to put in the date in such a way that you can use it in formulas, in such that it always adjusts, you can use a function, =today, and as you type it, you need to only type it this way and left parenthesis, press Return, same idea. And for the moment, it looks as if that's identical to this cell. In terms of visual content, it is, but if we open and close and save this file, day by day, the content in this will change. That's a function, and it always picks up today's date. Similarly here. If you'd like to put in the date and time together, you can use the function called now, left parentheses, and Return, and we see this.

If you'd like to display this as a time only, you can use the keystroke shortcut, control+shift+@. That's the same as saying control+shift+2 and it displays only the time in AM/PM style. Remember, both of these kinds of entries, the ones with functions, are dynamic, and they change in the course of a day for the now function and everyday, or upon opening, when you use the today function. So if we sit and stare at this, it will not change. This will never change unless we change it specifically.

So this said 11:29 AM when I put that in there. If I go about my business and do other things, maybe putting in some numbers down here, typing in some other data, you notice how that has changed already. So here are the two keystroke shortcuts we need. Any time you want to enter the current date, press control+;. If you want to enter the current time, it's either control+shift+; or command+;.