Working with dates can be a key thing in Excel. This tutorial gives you a few different ways to get the current date in Excel 2003, Excel 2007 and Excel 2010.
One way to get the date is using the function =NOW() which just puts the current date and time in to the cell as follows:
You can then format the cell (right click -> Format Cell, or Press Ctrl+1) to display it as you like, for example as a date in the format dd/mm/yyyy. Continue reading 'Get today's date in Excel'
This article shows you how to display a calendar for a given month, mainly using PHP's date() function.
The date() function displays the date in your desired format, at a given time. It works by accepting one or two parameters, the first is a string with the format, the letters in the string tell the function how to format the date. You can see what formatting options are available by seeing the PHP Manual entry for date(). If you just pass it a string to format the date then it uses the current time, however if you pass a timestamp (a standard way of representing time: the number of seconds since a set time in the 1970s), then it will output that date with the given format.
I often want to know what day of the week a date is. Excel has a function for this, but unfortunately it only returns an integer, for example the function:
=WEEKDAY("01/02/2009")
returns 1 (which represents Sunday).
This can be a bit confusing with a list of dates, so I wrote the following quick VBA function to get the day of the week as text, e.g. Sunday, Monday, etc.
The function (possibly not the most elegant method possible) is:
' function to return a text representation of the weekday of a given date ' returns the full text, which can be shortened by left(), etc Function dayText(d As Date) As String If Weekday(d) = 1 Then dayText = "Sunday" If Weekday(d) = 2 Then dayText = "Monday" If Weekday(d) = 3 Then dayText = "Tuesday" If Weekday(d) = 4 Then dayText = "Wednesday" If Weekday(d) = 5 Then dayText = "Thursday" If Weekday(d) = 6 Then dayText = "Friday" If Weekday(d) = 7 Then dayText = "Saturday" End Function(Enter this via the VBA Editor - press Alt+F11, then insert -> module and paste this code in).
It can then be called by:
=DAYTEXT("01/02/2009")
which returns Sunday.
This can then be shortened to one or three letters via the left() function, for example:
=LEFT(DAYTEXT("01/02/2009"),3)
returns Sun.
If you want to avoid macros, an alternative method is to use the (slightly messy) formula consisting of nested IFs, for a spreadsheet with a date in cell A1:
=IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=1, "Sunday", IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=2,"Monday",IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=3, "Tuesday", IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=4, "Wednesday", IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=5, "Thursday", IF(WEEKDAY(A1)=6, "Friday", "Saturday"))))))