How to Get Today's Date in Excel

The current date and time are some of the most common information that you’ll add to your Excel worksheet to keep track of activities. The good news is that there are several ways you can get the current date and time in an Excel cell. In this post, we’ll show you how you can easily insert today’s date in Excel.

There are two easy ways to enter the current date and time in Excel – by using an in-built function and keyboard shortcut. When you enter Date through a function, it will give you a dynamic value, while the keyboard shortcut will give you a static value.

Insert a Dynamic Date using Function

Sometimes you may want to display a date or time whose value is updated whenever the worksheet is opened or recalculated. In such cases, you can easily insert updatable current date or time in Excel using TODAY and NOW functions.

If you want to insert a dynamic date, then enter these two functions below in any cell. Neither of these functions requires any arguments or parameters to execute.

To return only the current date:

=TODAY()

Select any cell into which you want to enter the date and simply type the above formula. Remember there are no arguments, simply open and close parenthesis ‘()’ with nothing in between them.

To enter both current date and time:

=NOW()

Today’s Day Number

If you want only the day without month and year, then use this formula:

=DAY(TODAY())

In the above formula, the DAY function uses another date function TODAY as the argument to get the current day.

Today’s Month

If you want only the current month without day and year, then use this formula:

=MONTH(TODAY())

Today’s Year

Use the below formula get to current year:

=YEAR(TODAY())

Current Time

To enter the current time only, then use this formula:

=NOW()-TODAY()

Once you type the above formula and press enter, time will be displayed as the serial number as shown below. To display is it properly, go to the Home tab, click on the drop-down in the Number group, and choose ‘Time’ as your data type.

Now, the current time is displayed properly:

Add or Subtract Days to/from Today’s Date

You can add a certain number of days to the current date or subtract a specific number of days from the current date with the help of arithmetic operation.

For example, to add 5 days to todays’ date, use this formula:

=TODAY()+5

To subtract 5 days from the current date, use the below formula:

=TODAY()-5

You can also add only the workdays (weekdays) by excluding weekends (Saturday and Sunday) from your calculations with the help of the WORKDAY function. This function adds or subtracts only weekdays to/from the dates.

To add 20 workdays to the current date:

=WORKDAY(TODAY(),20)

The first argument of the above formula is a nested TODAY function and the second argument is how many days you want to add.

To subtract 20 workdays from today’s date:

=WORKDAY(TODAY(),-20)

Add a ‘-‘ (minus) operator before the number of days you want to subtract.

Insert a Static Date using Shortcuts

A static date and time are known as timestamps in Excel. It doesn’t change when a spreadsheet is opened or recalculated.

To enter the static date, first, select the cell where you want to insert the current date or time. Then press the following shortcuts in that cell.

To get today’s date, press Ctrl+;
To get the current time, press Ctrl+Shift+;
To get the current date and time, press Ctrl+; then hit ‘Space’ and then press Ctrl+Shift+;