Methods to create an Excel Date Time stamp in your spreadsheets depending on whether you want it to update itself or not.
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Excel Date Time Stamp
It is sometimes necessary in Excel to capture the date and the time but you don’t want Excel to update itself, you just want to put in the current date or time. Effectivily creating an Excel date time stamp. Instead of looking at the Calendar or at your watch, there is a nice shortcut you can use.
So if you want the date, what we can do is we hold the control key down and push the semi-colon – and you will see it gives you today’s date. If you want the time – you hold the control – shift and the semi-colon – it will tell you the current time. Notice that both of these are basically typed in so they are date-time-stamp. If tomorrow we opened up – it would still have these dates and times.
If you want to have this spreadsheet change the date depending on what day it is – there are two or three functions you can use. So one function under the date and time section is a function called “today” – as you can see it is just today, open bracket, close bracket, when I push OK it gives me today’s date –but because it is a formula – “tomorrow” will give me tomorrow’s date.
A similar type of function called “now” – what this one does – same syntax gives us the date and the time. And what you’ll see is next time we do an operation it will update this time depending on whether it has ticked over to the next minute – so let’s see ok so there you can see time has moved on to the next time.
It is important to realize that Excel is getting this data from your machine so if your machine’s date, or time is incorrect – it will not give you the correct information over here.