Manipulating dates & times with Microsoft Excel

There are a number of date and time functions in Excel. All of these can be useful in the right circumstances but three are particularly handy.

=TODAY()	Gives the date when the spreadsheet was last recalculated
=NOW()	Gives the time and date when the spreadsheet was last recalculated
=MOD(NOW(),1)	Gives only the time when the spreadsheet was last recalculated

By using suitable formatting in the cells it is possible to display the time and date in the way you wish. This is useful with the last two examples where you may display just the time and suppress the date information.

The above information is useful for manipulating times and dates that need to kept up to date but what if you wish to enter just the time or date at the current time? You can of course type in the current date but Excel has a couple of short cuts as detailed below.

+	Enters the current date as a constant.
+           or	Enters the current time as a constant.
+ +