Adding Excel Date Shortcut Everywhere

Easily add Excel insert date in any application

February 12, 2019 by cryan.com

If your a regular user of Excel you probably know the shortcut to add the current date to any field: Control ;

So, if your use to it, why not just make it a shortcut in any application.

Simple Shortcut

Here's is a simple way to add Excel 'Today's Date' feature using Keyboard Maestro.

Now when I need to add the date, I simply type in Control ;.

Advanced Technique

What if you need a different date format in different applications? For example, you may want to display today's date differently in Slack than in an Excel table.

There's a simple way to make this happen (This is what makes Keyboard Maestro a really cool application!) Simply put in a condition to check to see what is the current active application:

I used PHP to do the formatting here because I wanted to add an English ordinal suffix (1st, 3rd)

I can add multiple applications checks by adding additional conditions to the statement. Which makes it easy to have a single action short cut to display different formats in applications.