- The TODAY() function enters the current date on a Google Sheet cell.
- Once you enter the date, drag the cell to autofill the column with dates.
- You can use the formula =WORKDAY.INTL($A$2, row(A1),1) to autofill weekdays only.
Method 1: Automatically Enter the Current Date
Let’s start by automatically entering today’s date using the Google Sheets date function called TODAY(). This returns today’s date in a cell. Here’s how to use it.
Step 1: Open Google Sheets, place your cursor in a cell, and type the below function .
=TODAY()
Now, hit the enter key.
There you go. You can now see today’s date in a cell on Google Sheets.
Alternatively, you can also use the key combination Ctrl +; on a cell in Google Sheets, it will return the current date.
Method 2: How to Autofill Dates
Autofill is a feature on Google Sheets that helps you fill the cells in series with data based on values present in a few cells. For example, if I enter a date in Cell A1, I can fill the entire column A with dates, since Google Sheets recognizes that there’s a date in A1 and when prompted to autofill the rest of the column, it fills it with increasing order of dates.
However in case, you want to check the date and time format before you enter a date, here’s how to do it.
We can autofill days, weeks, and months in Google Sheets. Let’s see how we can do that.
1. Autofill Days in a Column in Google Sheets
Step 1: Open Google Sheets and enter a date in a cell.
Step 2: Click and hold on the bottom right corner of the cell and drag it down to the cell you want to autofill dates for.
As you can see, the dates are auto-filled for all the selected cells in a column in the same format.
2. Autofill Weeks in a Column on Google Sheets
Here’s how you can autofill dates in a column in Google Sheets that are a week apart.
Step 1: Open a Google Sheet and enter two dates that are a week apart in the consecutive cells.
Step 2: Select and highlight the cells.
Step 3: Click on the bottom right corner of the highlighted cells, and drag it until the cell you want to autofill.
As you can see, the column is filled with dates that are a week apart.
3. Autofill Months in a Column on Google Sheets
Step 1: Open Google Sheets and enter two dates a month apart in consecutive cells in the column.
Step 2: Select and highlight the cells.
Step 3: Click on the bottom right corner of the highlighted cells, and drag it until the cell you want to autofill.
The column is auto-filled with dates that are a few months apart.
Method 3: Autofill Weekdays Only
If you are using Google Sheets at work, you seldom need to enter data for a non-working day or a weekend. But in the previous method to autofill dates, weekends were also auto-filled. If you are working on a data-heavy spreadsheet, it is time-consuming to manually delete weekends.
Therefore, you can autofill dates excluding the weekends – Saturdays and Sundays. Here’s how.
Step 1: Open Google Sheets and enter a date in a cell that you want to start with.
Step 2: Enter the formula in the cell below. Make sure you enter the correct column in the formula. (column A in our case)
=WORKDAY.INTL($A$2, row(A1),1)
Step 3: The next cell is automatically filled with the next working day.
Step 4: Click on the bottom right corner of the cell, and drag it down to the cell that you want to fill. The formula governs the pattern, and will only enter working days and exclude Saturdays and Sundays.
As you can see in the image below, the cells contain only working days, and Saturdays and Sundays are excluded.
Next, let us see how we can merge date and time on Google Sheets. This will be helpful if you have two columns: one for the date and another for the time.
Bonus: Merge Date and Timestamp on Google Sheets
When you have a column with a date and a time that corresponds to it in a column, it makes sense to merge them into a single column and minimize the redundancy. Here’s how to do it.
Step 1: Open Google Sheets and enter the below formula that helps you merge date and time functions on Google Sheets into a text.
Make sure you enter the right cell locations for the date and time respectively. In our case, it is A2 and B2.
=TEXT(A2,"m/dd/yy")&TEXT(B2,"hh:mm:ss")
Step 2: As you can see, the date and time are merged into a single cell as plain text. You can select and drag the merged cells to autofill the entire column if you have multiple separate date and time cells.
