Are right the first to date and time functions that I share with you are today and now which are designed
to simply return the current date or the current exact time.
And the good news is that these are perhaps two of the simplest functions in Excel and they're so simple
because they actually don't even refer to other cells.
You just open and close your parentheses.
Don't even put anything inside.
Call it a day and you're good to go.
Important to note that these are volatile functions meaning that they will update any time you make
any worksheet change in any open workbook so they'll be constantly changing.
Let's jump in Excel and go ahead and open up Section 7 date time functions.
I will do a quick walkthrough as you can see in the first tab date time functions.
We've got a placeholder for the current date and current time which we're going to populate in just
a minute using today and now we also have a hypothetical project due date which we'll get to later.
And then this is basically where we're going to practice all of the functions that we learn in the upcoming
lectures.
The second tab is a blank budget pacing tool.
This is the demo that we're going to walk through at the end of the section where we're going to work
together and use these date and time functions to build out a custom budget pacing tool.
And then last but not least on the third tab called sample data.
We just have a series of dates and expenses.
And these are going to feed into the budget pacing tool that we build.
So jumping back to date time functions on Tab 1 let's just populate these today and now functions in
cells C2 C3.
So for current day type equals today open close enter so returns the current date which is August 18th
2015 current time same process equals.
Now open close press enter.
And as you can see they're returning the same thing except current time are the now function is just
a bit more granular that will introduce the hour minute and second components that the current date
or today function will not.
So there you go.
Extremely simple but this is going to be our starting point to practice the functions in the upcoming
lectures