To enter a date in Excel, you need to type the date in a format that Excel can recognize. When checking for a date, Excel will look for a month, a day, and a year in a variety of formats. If you don’t supply a year, Excel will use the current year. Let’s take a look. In North America, Excel defaults to a month, day, year format, so dates following this format are easily recognized. Many other formats are supported as well. If we leave out the year, Excel will assume we mean a date in the current year and add the year for us. This is handy if you’re doing data entry in the current year, but make sure you supply a year for any dates that are not in the current year.
Dave Bruns
Hi - I’m Dave Bruns, and I run Exceljet with my wife, Lisa. Our goal is to help you work faster in Excel. We create short videos, and clear examples of formulas, functions, pivot tables, conditional formatting, and charts.
