VBA – Get Today’s Date (Current Date)
In this Article
This tutorial will demonstrate how to get today’s date in VBA.
There are a couple of ways to obtain today’s date in VBA code, namely using the VBA Date() function or the VBA Now() functions.
Date() function
The Date() Function returns today’s date. In the example below, we assign today’s date to a variable and then display the date in the immediate window in the VBE Editor.
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Dim dtToday as Date dtToday = Date() Debug.Print dtToday |
Alternatively, we can display the date in a message box.
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Sub TestDate Dim dtToday as Date dtToday = Date() Msgbox "Today's date is " & dtToday End Sub |
Now() Function
The Now() Function works in the same way as the date function, but it includes the time.
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Sub TestDate() Dim dtToday As Date dtToday = Now() MsgBox "Today's date is " & dtToday End Sub |
Formatting Dates with VBA
In both the Date() and the Now() functions, the date is formatted in a default style as determined by the settings on our PC. We can customize this formatting using the VBA Format function. As the format function will return a string, we need to declare a STRING variable rather than a DATE variable.
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Sub TestDate() Dim dtToday As String dtToday = Format (Date, "dd mmmm yyyy") MsgBox "Today's date is " & dtToday End Sub |
We can also format the Now() function to include the time portion in a customized format.
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Sub FormatNow() Dim dtToday As String dtToday = Format(Now(), "dd mmmm yy hh:mm:ss am/pm") MsgBox dtToday End Sub |
Comparing 2 Dates with VBA
We can also use the Date function to compare today’s date with a different date – we might want to calculate how many days there are until an event! We can do this using the VBA DateDiff() function which will return a number. We can therefore declare an INTEGER variable to store the returned value in.
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Sub TestDateDiff() Dim dtToday As Date Dim dtSomeDay As Date Dim iDays As Integer dtToday = Date dtSomeDay = "05/06/2021" iDays = DateDiff("d", dtToday, dtSomeDay) MsgBox "There are " & iDays & " days between the 2 dates" End Sub |
As Dates are stored as numbers, we could also minus the second date from the first to obtain the same answer.
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iDays = dtToday - dtSomeDay |
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