How to enter dates in Excel

In this lesson, we'll look at how to enter dates in Excel.

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.