Tidy Up Dates and Times

Dates and times are truly everywhere in our data, from order dates and delivery deadlines to customer birthdays and transaction timestamps. They carry immense power for analysis, helping us understand trends, track progress, and predict future events. However, working with them can sometimes feel a bit complicated. They might look like plain text, but they behave differently and can easily trip us up if not handled properly.

As data analysts, we need to know how to clean, format, and analyze date/time data effectively. This mastery allows us to uncover crucial time-based patterns and deliver truly insightful observations.

Essential date and time functions

Let’s walk through the key Google Sheets functions we’ll use to manipulate, clean, and analyze dates and times. These are our essential tools for making sense of time-series data.

Getting the current date and time

These functions are perfect when we need to reference the current moment or day in our calculations.

• TODAY(): Returns the current date. This value updates daily. For example, =TODAY() might return ...