In today’s video, we are going to show you how to work with dates and times in Microsoft Excel 2016. First, we will show you the logic that Excel uses to calculate dates, and then we will show you how you can work with this logic.
It is useful to understand that Excel sees dates as numbers, adding one number for every day after the first of January 1900. The hours, minutes and seconds are stored as decimal values. Knowing this will help you be able to work with the date and time functions more easily.
The next step in working with dates and times is to know the “Today” function, which will bring up the current date in any cell, and the “Now” function, which will bring up the current date and time. If you need to reference a date in your spreadsheet, it is easier to type in the equal sign followed by “Today” and Excel will automatically populate the date for you.
Another common function is knowing how to calculate someone’s age using their date of birth in a formula. To do this you will need to know how to use either the “INT” or Integer function or the “YEARFRAC” function. Both will calculate the difference between a recorded date and the current date simply by using them in an equation.
Working with dates and times in Excel is very straight forward once you know how they are being processed. Knowing how to use functions to manipulate dates and times will help make you more accurate and efficient when working in Excel.
