When I enter a date it will only insert the sample date

Question

I have tried entering the date by right click "insert date" and choosing mm/dd/yy

when I hit enter the date appears as the sample date and I can't get the current date to appear.

Answer 1

If you are trying to create a cell that uses the date of the current day, meaning it will be different tomorrow than it is today, you want to enter =TODAY() in the cell.

If formatting the date is what you're looking to do, see the picture below. You can also add a custom date format by selecting the bottom option of the drop-down box and use syntax like DD/MMMM_YYYY which would output like 14/April_2016, likewise MM/DD/YY for 04/14/16

Via the comments- Entering a date without some sort of dividing punctuation between the numbers will result in likely unexpected behavior. For example, entering 041416, you may expect to see "April 14th, 2016" in whichever form selected. However the way Excel handles input like this is that it will count that number of days beyond January 1st, 1900. This is why you will actually get the date 5/22/2013 by entering 041416.

To learn more about this, follow this link https://support.office.com/en-us/article/DATEVALUE-function-df8b07d4-7761-4a93-bc33-b7471bbff252?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US