Today's Date in One Shortcut: Ctrl+;

Typing today's date by hand means writing out the day, month, and year and hoping you didn't slip up on the format Excel expects. The Ctrl+semicolon shortcut skips all that — it inserts the current date with one keypress, always in the right format and without a typo. Unlike the =TODAY() formula, though, it's a fixed value that won't change the next day.

A typical scenario

Lenka logs incoming invoices and needs to record the received date for each one. By hand, she'd have to type the current date into dozens of rows every day, watch the format, and risk it getting overwritten one day, or writing yesterday's date because she lost track of what day it was.

With Ctrl+; she just clicks the cell and presses the shortcut — the date is inserted instantly and exactly, in whatever format the column is set to. If she used =TODAY() instead, the date would quietly update to the current day the next time she opened the workbook — for an invoice received yesterday, that's a mistake she might not even notice.

How to do it

1. Click a cell and press Ctrl + ; (semicolon) — today's date is inserted as a fixed value.
2. For the current time, use Ctrl + Shift + ;; you can even combine both shortcuts in one cell, one after the other, with the date and time separated by a space.
3. The key difference from the =TODAY() formula: the shortcut inserts a static value that stays the same until you change it manually — the =TODAY() formula, on the other hand, recalculates to the current day every time the workbook is opened.
4. So use the shortcut anywhere you're logging when something happened (a received date, an entry date), and the =TODAY() formula only where you want to see the live current date, say when calculating days until a due date.
5. The displayed date format follows the cell's format — if it looks different than you expect, adjust the cell format (Ctrl+1 → Number → Date); the value that was inserted stays the same.

The best tools

• The built-in Ctrl+; shortcut (Excel) — the fastest and most reliable way to a fixed date, no risk of a typo.
• Google Sheets — the same Ctrl+; shortcut inserts today's date, and Ctrl+Shift+; inserts the current time; the behavior is practically identical to Excel.
• Conditional formatting on the date column — a natural next step, say to highlight entries older than a week, useful for tracking invoice due dates.

What you get out of it

• Time: a couple of seconds per entry instead of typing the date by hand — across dozens of entries a day, that's real minutes.
• Accuracy: no date-format typos, and no entries with “today's” date that silently rewrite themselves tomorrow.
• A reliable history: a fixed date stays a valid record even a year later, when nobody will remember exactly when the invoice arrived.

Pro tip

If you want a date that's always current at a glance — say, in a report header — use the =TODAY() formula instead of the shortcut. Both variants can happily live in the same workbook, just for different purposes.