“Date” entered in a cell
When you type in a “Date” in “Excel”, use the hyphen i.e the minus sign (–) in the syntax, or the slash (/).

A “Date” is always aligned to the right in a cell (1).

So if you type a “Date” that does not exist, for example, 30 February 2010, then Excel will treat this as text which is left aligned(2).

A quick way to the enter today’s “Date” is to use the shortcut ‘Ctrl+;’ on your keyboard.

If you want the “Date” to automatically adjusts to the current “Date” when you open the “Excel” file, then type’ = today () (3)’.
 
Enter hours in a cell
If you wish to enter “Time” in ” Excel”, first type the hour, then colon, then the minute for example. 2:30 p.m.

By default it appears in “hours: minutes: seconds” format.

If you want to change this, click the downward pointing arrow (1) next to the “Number” group in “Home” tab on the “Ribbon”, choose “More Number Formats” in the drop-down menu, choose “Time” (2) as a category, and select a different format for your time in the list.

If you wish the “Time” to be automatically adjusted to the current hour when you open the Excel file, then type ‘ = Now ()‘. This provides the “Date” and “Time” of the current day (1).

So if you wish to show only the hour, then click the downward pointing arrow (2) beside the “Number” group in “Home” tab on the “Ribbon”, choose “More Number Formats” in the drop-down menu, choose the category “Custom” (3) and in the “Type” (4) box remove the text
d / mm / yyyy so only h: mm left (5).

Display “Date”
The same applies when you modify a “Date” format. Again, click the downward pointing arrow beside the “Number” group in “Home” tab on the “Ribbon”, choose “More Number Formats” in the drop-down menu and choose the “Custom” category.

 

I will try to explain how “Excel” interprets this information.

You have ‘d’ for day, ‘m’ for month, and ‘y’ for years.

Four lettered ‘dddd’ displays the day in its entirety, eg Sunday.

Two lettered ‘dd’ displays the day as number, eg 01.

Four lettered ‘dddd’ space ‘dd’, gives Sunday 01

 

Four lettered ‘mmmm’ displays the month as a full, eg February.

Twice the letter ‘mm’ indicates the month as number.

Three times the letter ‘mmm’ indicates the month abbreviated again, eg in Feb

 

The same goes for year

Twice the letter ‘yy’ gives 10 instead of 2010.

Four times the letter ‘yyyy’ indicates 2010 again.

 

You can switch between the different characters spaces, hyphens, slashes, basically everything.
 
 
Fill “Date”
Instead of manually typing all dates, we use the fill handle at the bottom right cell, to continue the dates.

For example, type a “Date” into a cell and click ENTER on your keyboard. Select the cell again. At the bottom right of the cell you see a black square. We call this the “Fill handle”.

Click and drag it down. The dates are automatically updated.

 

When the mouse is released after dragging a button, will automatically appear (1) with options for “AutoFill”.

When you click it, a pop-up menu (2) where we have the choice among “Fill days”, “Fill weekdays”, “Fill months” or “Fill years” (3 ).

I suppose you will know what to choose.

 

Featured Courses

• Downloading iPad Apps
• Lesson 1: Introduction to Publisher
• Lesson 65: File Formats