Top 7 Tricks of Working with Dates in Excel

Top 7 Tricks for Working with Dates in Excel

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How to work with Dates in Excel?

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Dates and times are two of the most common data types people work within Excel, but they are also possibly the most frustrating to work with, especially if you are new to Excel and still learning. Here is the definitive guide to working with dates in Excel:

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TODAY& NOW

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The TODAY function always returns the current date’s serial number. The TODAY function is just entered as: =TODAY().

There’s also Excel shortcut that would make the today’s date appear in the cell. “Ctrl+;” would do that trick for you.

A similar function called NOW always returns the current date and time’s serial number. The NOW function is just entered as =NOW().

Excel shortcut that would make current time appear in the cell is “Ctrl +:”.

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NETWORKDAYS

NETWORKDAYS returns the number of working days between dates.

WEEKDAY & WEEKNUM

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WEEKDAY returns a number from 1 to 7 identifying the day of the week of a date.

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DATEDIF

DATEDIF calculates the number of days, months or years between two dates. Excel doesn’t show this formula in the list, so you have to type the whole function and use parenthesis to make the formula work. The screenshots below will give you an idea of how the function works.

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Operation with dates in Excel

You can also do operations with dates, for example, subtract as shown in the example below.

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EDATE

EDATE returns a date that is a specific number of months before or after a supplied start date.

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Summary

There’s so much you can do working with dates in Excel, it’s an infinite topic. But the tips and tricks covered in this blog would help you with the most frequent tasks regarding dates in Excel. Enjoy!

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