The TODAY function

The TODAY function is a date and time function which returns the current system date. Every time a cell is recalculated, this function will update itself to the current date.

This is the format of the TODAY function:

=TODAY()

Here is an example of the TODAY function:

=TODAY() = March 5, 2020 

TODAY function returning the system date at the time which it was entered into Excel

This function is valuable when dating things like reports automatically and consistently to reduce errors in formatting. When paired with something like the WEEKDAY function you can have the system return the date of a particular day of each week.

An example of a functional implementation of this would be having a weekly report where you indicate the date range the report covers in the report. To do so you take the current date, and paired with the WEEKDAY function you can adapt it to always return the day of the previous Monday.

ex: It is currently Wednesday February 19, 2020. The report needs to be dated Monday the 17th.

=TODAY() – WEEKDAY(TODAY(),3)