Let's take a look at inputting dates and time stamps in Excel.
The way you input dates depend on your regional settings. That decides if you input month first or day
first.
So right here in cell B3, let's type in "1/2/2019"
Keep your eye on the format in this box right here.
I'm going to press control+enter to stay in the same cell.
What happened? That automatically changed to the date format.
This is a good sign because it means Excel has recognized what I input as a date. The other way you can
recognize this is that Excel automatically right aligned this date.
This means that it recognized it as a number because that's how Excel remembers dates.
And we're gonna be digging deeper on this topic in a future lecture in another section.
But here's the question what type of date is this?
Is this the second of January or the first of February.
That's what's taken by your regional Windows settings and we can check that here as well.
If we just right mouse click on the cell and go to format cells. We automatically come to the date options
here because Excel has already recognized this as a date.
And down here I can see that my locale is set to English U.S. Which means in my case the first digit is
the month and the second one is the day.
I can also choose another type of date format. If I just click on this one because I want to see the
month as three letters I'm going to click on okay and that's going to be reflected in the cell.
In addition to the other options I had here I have two date options directly from this dropdown.
One is the short date which was the way I input at the beginning and I also have the option for the
long date. Which brings in the day of the week as well.
Now if you happen to see something like this that means your cell is too small to show what's inside.
So you just have to increase the size of the cell.
We're just double click this to make it fit. Let's switch this back to short date.
One thing to note is that you don't necessarily need to type in the entire year, so it's enough to type
in 19 and press enter. Excel automatically converts this to 2019.
The rule is this, anything between zero to twenty nine is seen as this century and thirty to ninety nine
is seen as the last century.
So if you want to type a date before the 1st of January 1930 you need to type the four digit year.
One shortcut
I often use when I work with dates is the Ctrl and the pound key or the hash sign. That automatically
applies this date format which makes the date easier to read. Especially if you're sharing files with
people from other countries and it's not always clear which one is the day, which one is the month, you
can switch to this format and you can do it really fast using the shortcut key Ctrl and the pound
key.
You might come across situations where you need to add a timestamp to your work. Let's say you're
reviewing your report or you've just input some data and you immediately want to input today's date.
Of course you can type it in but there is a great shortcut key for it and that's Ctrl and the semicolon
and press enter.
Now you might need to press Ctrl+shift+semicolon
if Ctrl and semicolon doesn't work for you. What if you want to have the date and the time? You can
use Ctrl+semicolon then add a space and then Ctrl+shift+semicolon. Or Ctrl+shift+Colon
if Ctrl+shift+semicolon doesn't work for you. And press enter. These are static so they're great for timestamps.
Okay so that's the basics for inputting dates and timestamps in Excel. In a future lecture we're going to
be dealing with making calculations with dates and as well as times.
So for example if you need to create a time sheet where you input your start time and your end time
and you want to calculate the hours worked that can be quite tricky in Excel.
So we're gonna be covering that in a future section.