Excel Ctrl+; Shortcut: Insert Today's Date as a Fixed Value

Logs, checklists and request trackers all need a date column. Typing the full date into each cell is about ten keystrokes every time, and it is easy to mistype a digit when you are doing it for the twentieth row.

TL;DR: Ctrl+; enters today's date in the active cell. Select several cells first and finish with Ctrl+Enter to fill all of them.

Steps

1. Select the cell where the date should go and press Ctrl+; (Ctrl and the semicolon key). Today's date appears in the cell.
2. Press Enter to confirm.
3. To fill many cells at once, select them all, press Ctrl+;, then press Ctrl+Enter instead of Enter. Every selected cell gets the same date.

Checked in the free Excel for the web.

Why not =TODAY()?

The shortcut enters a plain date value, not a formula. That difference matters.

=TODAY() recalculates. Open the workbook tomorrow and every cell using it shows tomorrow's date. That is fine for a "days until deadline" calculation, but wrong for a log where you want to record when something happened.

Ctrl+; writes the date once and leaves it alone, the same as if you had typed it.

Common mistakes

Using =TODAY() in a "date received" or "date completed" column is the classic one. Everything looks right on the day you enter it, and then all the dates quietly move.

Another is pressing Enter instead of Ctrl+Enter after selecting a range. Enter only fills the active cell; Ctrl+Enter is what pushes the entry into the whole selection.

How the date looks depends on the cell's number format and your regional settings. If you see a five-digit number instead of a date, the value is fine; change the cell format to a date format.

Doing the same thing in code

If a script is filling the sheet, write a date value, not the TODAY formula, for the same reason as above. With openpyxl:

import datetime
ws["B2"] = datetime.date.today()

In VBA, Range("B2").Value = Date does the same job. Both store a fixed date, which matches what the keyboard shortcut does by hand.

This post was put together with help from AI; the shortcut behavior was checked in Excel for the web.