Excel® 2016 All-in-One For Dummies® by Greg Harvey PhD

Author:Greg Harvey PhD [Harvey, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119077275
Published: 2015-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Using Date Functions

Excel contains a number of built-in Date functions that you can use in your spreadsheets. When you install and activate the Analysis ToolPak add-in (see Book I, Chapter 2 for details), you have access to a number of additional Date functions — many of which are specially designed to deal with the normal Monday through Friday, five-day workweek (excluding, of course, your precious weekend days from the calculations).

TODAY

The easiest Date function has to be TODAY. This function takes no arguments and is always entered as follows:

=TODAY()

When you enter the TODAY function in a cell by clicking it on the Date & Time command button’s drop-down list on the Ribbon’s Formulas tab or by typing it, Excel returns the current date by using the following Date format:

9/15/2016

Keep in mind that the date inserted into a cell with the TODAY function is not static. Whenever you open a worksheet that contains this function, Excel recalculates the function and updates its contents to the current date. This means that you don’t usually use TODAY to input the current date when you’re doing it for historical purposes (an invoice, for example) and never want it to change.

If you do use TODAY and then want to make the current date static in the spreadsheet, you need to convert the function into its serial number. You can do this for individual cells: First, select the cell, press F2 to activate Edit mode, press F9 to replace =TODAY() with today’s serial number on the Formula bar, and click the Enter button to insert this serial number into the cell. You can do this conversion on a range of cells by selecting the range, copying it to the Clipboard by clicking the Copy button on the Home tab of the Ribbon (or pressing Ctrl+C), and then immediately pasting the calculated values into the same range by choosing the Paste Values option from the Paste command button’s drop-down menu (or pressing Alt+HVV).

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