How to Add the Date and Time in Word 2013 Document

Word 2010 For Dummies

You probably have people who want to know the current date and time, or maybe you simply want to insert the date or time, or both, into your Word 2013 document. With few exceptions, time travelers are the only ones who bother asking for the current year. But you may need it in your document for record-keeping purposes. Regardless, Word has many tricks for making it happen.

Aside from looking at a calendar and typing a date, you can use the Date and Time button (shown in the margin), found in the Text group on the Insert tab. Click the button to display a dialog box from which you can choose how to insert the current date or time into your document.

Click the Update Automatically option in the dialog box so that the date-and-time text is always current.
The keyboard shortcut for the current date is Alt+Shift+D. This command inserts a content control into your document to display the current date.
The keyboard shortcut for inserting the current time is Alt+Shift+T. Unlike the current date, this shortcut inserts a field, not a content control, into your document.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.