From the course: Excel 2019 Essential Training

Working with dates and times

From the course: Excel 2019 Essential Training

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Working with dates and times

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- [Speaker] Excel has a great deal of computational capability when you need to work with dates and to a lesser extent times. Provided that kind of information is entered properly. When you're typing a date entry in excel use a slash or a dash. That's been done in this example. We're looking at the worksheet date-times in this workbook zero two entering data. I'm gonna type in the cell just below this. This time I'll use a dash for nearby date. Press enter. Anytime you type an entry with a slash or a dash excel looks at it as if it could be a date and if it is it stores it right aligned. And that means it's a value. You don't necessarily need to know that this is a number being stored in the background. Every date in excel has a value associated with it. Now, if you type in an entry that might look like a date, but it's not a date...11 slash 31...there is no November 31st of any year. Enter. Excel puts that on the left side of the cell. Now, because it's got a two digit year that jumps out as well too, but keep the column for a date a little bit wider. Sometimes people type four digit years. And they could be at least for awhile assumed to be correct. So slash or dash is the way you should do these. Now, whether you know what's happening behind the scenes or not, what is important is you can use these in a computational sense. When is 100 days from this date? Equal by way of a formula, some of you have never used formulas in excel just yet, but if we refer the cell here to the left it's cell B2 and we add 100. We will get a date that's 100 days later. Just like that. November 18th. And we could've used subtraction to look in the opposite direction. And not only can we use these in a computational sense, there are functions built into excel. For example, there's one called weekday that would allow you to use or to figure out what the day of the week is for any date that you use. So making date entries, like the ones we're seeing here. Typing slash or dash will make sense. The bad entries of course will just need to be erased and corrected at a later time. If you highlight two consecutive dates and then drag from the corner. The interval...the first two for example three will be carried in this case downward into other cells as well too. So those are just a couple of examples of how if we are working with properly entered dates we can do things with them in a computational sense. And if you're using times of day, use a colon and type either 24 hour style like we see here or another technique probably would be in a different column perhaps would be something like this. If you want to type you know 4:30pm. Four-colon-three-zero space p that's good enough. That'll work too. If you do have times of day, you'd want to be consistent so in this column we'd be using 24 hour style. Different set of data over here. We'd be using the AM/PM style. But here too. Computationally, we could be putting in different times and figuring out elapsed time. And of course we could also do this with dates. So dates and times for many users in excel are important. Don't think of them as idle entries that you'll never use, but just look at...they can be used in formulas and with great effect as you work with excel.

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