Noting the Workbook Creation Date

When you are developing a worksheet, you may need to keep track of certain information about your workbook. For instance, you might want to place the creation date of a workbook into a cell. While Excel does provide some worksheet functions for dates (such as NOW or TODAY), it does not provide a worksheet function to access the workbook creation date.

This means that the answer lies in using a macro. For instance, you might create a macro that would determine the current date and input it (as text) into a particular cell. This macro could then be run whenever you created a new workbook by naming the macro Auto_Open. The following is an example of such a macro:

Sub Auto_Open()
    If Worksheets.Application.Range("A1") = "" Then
        Worksheets.Application.Range("A1") = Format(Date, "long Date")
    End If
End Sub

The macro checks to see what is in cell A1. If there is nothing there, then it puts the text version of today's date in there. If there is something already there (which there would be every time you subsequently open the workbook), then the information is left intact and unscathed.

Perhaps the most satisfactory approach, however, is to actually access the operating system and pull the file creation date for the current workbook. This can be done with the following macro function:

Function CreateDate() As String
    Dim Temp As String

    On Error Resume Next
    Temp = CreateObject("scripting.filesystemobject"). _
      GetFile(ActiveWorkbook.FullName).dateCreated
    If Err.Number <> 0 Then
        CreateDate = "Not Saved"
    Else
        CreateDate = Left(Temp, InStr(Temp, " ") - 1)
    End If
    On Error Goto 0
End Function

Notice that this approach isn't tied to a particular cell in your worksheet. To use the macro, simply put the following in any cell of your worksheet:

=CreateDate()

The function returns either "Not Saved" (if the workbook is brand new and hasn't been saved before) or it returns a text value that represents the date on which the workbook was created.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (10234) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Noting the Workbook Creation Date.