While Google Sheets is meant to be used solely for personal use, you can follow the steps below to create a custom time or date in your spreadsheet. This might be helpful if you are using data to calculate graphs or building simulations and need to represent a certain time as users progressing through different parts of the experiment. 9. Recalculate your data
Once you’re happy with what your spreadsheet output looks like, you can re-calculate the same formulas over and over (or just update it and rerun them) to keep an eye out for certain important factors in your data. These include things like team balance, player trends, or win percentage changes as a response to a specific change in strategy.
How to Create a Date
Creating a custom date is a convenient way to improve the aesthetic of your Google calendar. The steps are simple. Open up your google sheet and go to the top menu bar where it says “File” and choose “Make a copy.” This will open off of a new sheet in your Google Drive. Make sure you Clic on the green minus button next to the file on the left just under “Create copy.” On this new sheet, click on the beginning of the column titled “A1” and you will see two tick down arrows appear. Change both columns from 100% ms to 1 hour ms by clicking on either arrow and placing your cursor over the hour row directly below each arrow until both show up in green. Now change all columns from 1 hour ms to 12 hours ms by clicking on either arrow twice like before and putting your cursor over that row directly below it. Eventually you will have reached 12 hours, so this is now correct time! Your time on this sheet will now actually be accurate. Try the same steps for a month and the years after that. It gets progressively easier each time you do this.
How can we manipulate our data to make it most useful? We can alter rows or columns as shown in the following image. You may want to change both values, or one value or none at all by just clicking on your mouse to pick one option. When you click on an option your cursor appears over an arrow head
How to Create a Time
To create a time, simply precede the word “time” with the number of seconds followed by a colon for every zero you want. For example: 08:59:00 , which is approximately 09:00 AM Eastern Time.
How to Create a Date or a TimePoint. You can create just about any data point by replacing the word “point” with the date, time, or string of alphabetic characters or numeric digits you want and save it as an integer ID. For example, you could give your date a name such as “Toy Story 3 Easter Egg.” Then, convert 13 seconds into 11 milliseconds and use 0378 in the format to
If No Data Available
There are many time and date options already created by default in Google Sheets. However, sometimes you may need to create a custom time or date such as a holiday, an important event, or the day something big happened. The moment could also be something else that’s not available in the choices already on the calendar such as “first car.” Another reason to create a custom date is if you want to use the date of a specific sheet sheet location. As a good example, you may have several spreadsheets of client data that all contain important accounting information — One for last month’s sales and another for this month’s sales numbers. When you export a monthly report from Google Sheets into Excel, it automatically exports the data in the proper spreadsheet. But if you manually enter the data on those master sheets, then those exact data sets
Repeatable Times or Dates
You can create a custom time or date anywhere on your sheet by trying to find the sheet name and then clicking the “More Actions” icon. From there, you will see a drop-down menu that includes “date/time formatted as…”. Select this option in order to create something unique. An example of this is seen below. I have chosen to create a repeatable musical performance using the Amazon Musicals 2014-2015 schedule and today’s time.
This will create dates for all performances in that year showing January 2nd, 4th, 6th, etc. This can be very useful for later reference when scheduling other events. You can even add an accrual factor to your date so it will show how many shows it takes to cover your ticket sales in a
A Shorter Example
On Google Sheets, a cell can have multiple different values and ranges. One example is creating a custom time or date in the column to the right of the cell you are currently viewing. This cell has two different sets of dates, one is 6/25/17 and the second is 6/25/2017 both separated by 66 months; a very short but clear extra distinction.
The dashes for current-year-month-2 are used to callout the entire custom range that equates to 9 seasons in 2017 (April – October), not day – date [1x] or day — date. I recommend referring back to those posts where I can give an overview
Final Words
One of my favorite things to do on Google sheets is to create a custom date or time. It is this easy! And according to the CEO, time is cash. Now that you have been inspired, start using date and times in your workbooks! Enjoy!