By Michael Barden
In the last edition of Office for Mere Mortals we looked at the basics of the date and time formats, the different ways they can and should be displayed, and how they are actually stored by Excel.
In this article we use the basic date formulas in Excel as building blocks and combine them to create more powerful date-based functions. You'll be surprised how easily these tasks can be achieved.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TODAY() AND NOW()
The =TODAY() function returns the current date only based on your computer system's calendar.
The =NOW() function returns both the current date _and_ time based on your computer system's calendar and clock.
Try typing them into separate cells in a worksheet and you will see they are displayed differently - one with time and one without.
NOW() = 12 Mar 2007 23:05
TODAY() = 12 Mar 2007
The difference may not seem like much, but keep in mind that serial date representations are also used in date and time comparisons, here's what Excel is really storing for the above examples:
NOW() = 39153.96181
TODAY() = 39153
Strictly speaking TODAY() returns the date and the time at midnight e.g. 12 Mar 2007 00:00:00 .
Therefore NOW() does not equal TODAY() because the numbers are not exactly equal - but if you're just looking at the date component that doesn't seem correct.
Article posted: Tuesday, 13 March 2007
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