Let’s take a look at the Date Visual first.
The worksheet in front of us attempts to illustrate how Excel looks at time. So, we’ve got a little box here that says day one according to excel is January 1st, 1900, and that value is stored as a date serial number, the number one. And this is Illustrated over here too. We’ve got “Day 1:” and then the date January 1st, 1900. If you look in this cell, I’m clicked into the cell, that contains this date, and you can see up here that it’s formatted as a date, but if I change the format to General, you can see it’s just a number. So if I change that number 1 to a date,
it’s January 1st 1900. Then we have another date here, that November 29, 2022, is represented by the number 44,894. And if we look in this cell and we switch the format to General, we can see that that is the number that represents that date. I go back to the short date format. But now, let’s go to the Date Functions worksheet and take a look at the Today() function. The Today() Function
looks like this: there is no argument in the parentheses:
“= Today( ).” That’s the complete function. And what it does, is it returns today’s date, in date format. Which the date I’m recording this is: April 6, 2023. But I CAN go to this cell, and change the format from Date format to General format, and then the number that we see there is the number of days since the beginning of time according to excel: which is 45,022. Because Excel represents dates this way, it allows, once you understand that, then you can also do date arithmetic, calculating how many days are between two different dates and then even turning that into calculations for years. So if we go back to the date visual, we have an example here, that an estimate of the number of years that have passed between two dates, you can get by subtracting one date from another and then dividing the difference by 365. So for example, we’ve got these calculations over here, the number of days between November 29th, 2022 and January 1st, 1900 was 44,893 days. And that’s almost 123 years, since the beginning of time according to Excel.
And that’s all for the Today() Function. Thank you.