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Date & Time Functions in Spreadsheets

Google Sheets, Excel, and friends

Dates in spreadsheets look friendly. Reassuring. Familiar. They are none of those things.

In this lesson, we unpack one of the most important (and most misunderstood) spreadsheet concepts: dates and times are just numbers in disguise.

Dates are serial numbers (wearing a convincing costume)

When you enter a date like 9 February 2026, it looks like a date — but behind the scenes it’s actually a serial number. Each day increments by 1, starting from a fixed origin date defined by the spreadsheet system.

That’s why:

• 29 Aug 1997 → 35671
• 28 Aug 1997 → 35670

One day earlier = one less in the serial value.

This matters because once dates are numbers, you can do maths with them:

• =TODAY() + 1 → tomorrow
• =NOW() + 1.5 → 36 hours from now

Powerful… but dangerous if you don’t know what’s happening underneath.

Time is the decimal part

Times work the same way — just as fractions of a day:

• Whole number = date
• Decimal = time

So:

• 0.5 = 12 hours
• 0.25 = 6 hours

This is why:

• Adding 0.5 shifts time by half a day
• Adding 1 always advances the date by exactly one day

TODAY() vs NOW() — and why NOW() bites people

• TODAY() returns the current date
• NOW() returns date and time

But here’s the catch: NOW() recalculates every time the sheet changes.

That means it’s not a safe timestamp unless you deliberately freeze it. We’ll deal with that properly in a later lesson — but for now, caution is advised.

Building dates properly with DATE()

Instead of typing dates manually, you can (and often should) build them explicitly:

=DATE(2025, 1, 31)

Why this matters:

• Avoids UK vs US date-format disasters
• Prevents silent data quality errors
• Makes imported data far safer to work with

You can also rebuild dates from components:

• Year column
• Month column
• Day column

Extracting parts of a date or time

Once you have a proper date/time value, you can extract:

• YEAR()
• MONTH()
• DAY()
• HOUR()
• MINUTE()
• SECOND()

These all work because the underlying value is still numeric.

Formatting dates as text (and the big warning)

Using formatting codes (like TEXT()), you can control exactly how a date appears:

• MM → 11
• MMM → Nov
• MMMM → November
• DDD → Sat
• DDDD → Saturday

You can even build fully custom formats:

Saturday, 05 November 1955 - 10:04

But once you do this…

⚠️ It is no longer a date. ⚠️ It is now text.

You cannot:

• Extract the year
• Add days
• Use date maths

We’ll deal with error handling later — for now, just remember:

Formatting changes how it looks, not what it is — until you convert it to text.

Key takeaways

• Dates are numbers
• Times are decimals
• TODAY and NOW are volatile
• DATE and TIME give you control
• TEXT formatting is powerful but destructive

Have a play. Break things safely. And keep an eye out for the next lesson.

— Duke