In this tutorial I will show you the different things you can do with Excel’s Date & Time function.
How to use the Date & Time Function in Excel
Dates and times are a special type of cell in Excel. For convenience, when you type a string into a cell that uses the “/” or “-” characters and that is a valid date, automatically Excel will recognize it’s a date
you entered. Also, if you want to enter a time
you can do that as well by using the “:” symbol. Lastly, it’s also possible to enter a Date
and Time
in a single cell.
By default Dates are in US Format, however this also depends on your Windows regional settings. The US date format looks like this:
(Month/Day/Year)
YEAR, MONTH and DAY Function in Excel
If you have a date entry in your Excel workbook you can use the YEAR
, MONTH
and DAY
function for Excel to show you what year, month or day that date is.
To do this simply use one of the three functions and click on the cell with the date entry. For example below you can see I used the YEAR(A1)
function to get the year of the date in cell A1.
DATE Function
Oftentimes you want to add some days to a specific date. This is easily doable by using + or – operators. To add or subtract a number of days to a date use this very simple formula shown below.
It is also possible to add or subtract a specific number of years, months and/or days using the DATE
function. Simply insert the number of years, months and days you wish to add or subtract into the function.
Note that in the example above I added 1 year, 4 months and 16 days to the original date entry.
Current Date & Time
If you want to get the date and time of today, you can use the NOW
Function. If you only want the current date (without the time) use the TODAY
function.
And with this little trick you can also get the only the current time:
=NOW()-TODAY()
HOUR, MINUTE and SECOND Function
If you have a date entry in your Excel workbook you can use the HOUR
, MINUTE
and SECOND
functions for Excel to show you what hour, minute or second it is.
In the following example I use the HOUR(A1)
function to get the hour of the date and time in cell A1.
TIME Function in Excel
To add or subtract a number of hours, minutes and/or seconds use this very simple function shown below.
Note that in the example above I added 2 hours, 10 minutes and 45 seconds to the original time entry.
For doubts or questions, feel free to contact me in the comment section below and I will answer you as quickly as possible.