INTRODUCTION
DATES and TIME , if you are new to Excel and you have already tried using those format, I am pretty sure that you must have felt panicky at some sort of time.
It is quite obvious because when we don’t know the exact working of any system or process, we try to use it just by hit and trial method. It works sometimes and sometimes not.
Here we are talking about Dates and Time in Excel. These are the tricky formats which we need frequently in our reports or charts.
Many times, we need to do operations on them. We need to put them in the conditions to trigger some event which makes it very important for us to learn the exact procedures to perform a task concerned with the dates and time.
In this article we would learn different tricks and methods to handle and manipulate Dates and Time formats so that they don’t mess up with our reports.
The problem we’ll discuss here is to get the current time in Excel as we don’t have any function to find out the time directly.BEFORE READING THIS ARTICLE , IT IS REQUESTED TO VISIT THE PART I WHICH DISCUSSES THE CONCEPT OF THE DATE AND TIME IN EXCEL FOR BETTER UNDERSTANDING.CLICK HERE TO VISIT.
CALCULATE CURRENT TIME IN EXCEL
The current time calculation is quite easy in Excel as we already have the functions which provide us the current time but indirectly.We can solve this problem in two ways .
- USING NOW AND TODAY FUNCTION
- USING TEXT AND NOW FUNCTION
USING NOW AND TODAY FUNCTION:
CONCEPT:
We can make use of Now() function which gives the current date and time altogether and Today() function which gives the current date only.
Now as we know that we need the current time only, we can subtract Today() from Now(), the integral part would be subtracted and we would be left with the decimal part only which is the time.
STEPS TO INSERT CURRENT TIME IN EXCEL
- Place the cursor in the cell where you want to insert the time.
- Put the formula =NOW()-TODAY() and click ENTER.
- The result would appear.
USING TEXT AND NOW FUNCTION:
CONCEPT:
We can make use of the versatile TEXT FUNCTION in combination with NOW() function to find out the current time. As we know that NOW() FUNCTION returns the current time with the current date, we can specify the time format to extract the time portion with the help of TEXT FUNCTION.
STEPS TO INSERT CURRENT TIME IN EXCEL
- Place the cursor in the cell where you want to insert the time.
- Put the formula =TEXT(NOW(),”HH:MM:SS”) and click ENTER.
- The result would appear as the current time as shown in the picture below.
