Excel: Date today - how to display it in your document

With the spreadsheet program Excel, you have numerous functions at your disposal with which you can edit or also visualize data sets. If you need the current date for a calculation, then Excel also offers a suitable function for this.

How to display today's date in Excel

When editing records, you may often find that you need the current date. This can be useful for calculating the age of people as well as for labeling records. Here you have two different functions to choose from, which provide different outputs, but both contain today's date.

1. With the function "NOW()" you get the date at the current time. In addition, the function includes the exact time to execute the command. This is represented in hours, minutes and seconds. Alternatively, the English version is "NOW()".
2. However, if you only want to get the current date displayed or calculate with it, then the function "TODAY()" provides a remedy. With this only the date is displayed.
3. To execute the function, you must click on an empty cell in which the result should be displayed. Then enter, for example, "=TODAY()" and confirm the entry with the "Enter" key. Now the cell will display today's date.
4. Alternatively, you can also include the function in other functions, for example, if you want to calculate the age of people.