Today's tip is a short one, but one of the most used in finance - Toggling the formats from date to number and back again.

The default date format in Excel is very rubbish, so whenever I enter a date, I always reformat it immediately into something sensible.

Lets show you how..

Step1:
Enter a date in a single cell.
For example - enter doday's date by using the Excel date shortcut for TODAY: CTRL + ;

For me today, this returns: 02/02/2009

Step2:
Press CTRL and # to change it to a good date format (dd-mmm-yy)

Step3:
Press CTRL and SHIFT and # to change it to a number. You might not want to do that for this example, but it is useful to know that CTRL and SHIFT and # formats a cell as a number

Download a spreadsheet to practice how to format dates in Excel

Training Video: Toggle Date Format