TODAY vs NOW: date, or date plus time?
TODAY() is midnight at the start of today; NOW() is this exact second. The fractional day NOW carries is what quietly breaks date comparisons — and neither function is the right tool when you need a timestamp that doesn't change.
The differences at a glance
| TODAY | NOW | |
|---|---|---|
| Returns | Today's date (time = 00:00) | Date AND time-of-day fraction |
| A2=TODAY() when A2 is today's date | TRUE | FALSE for NOW() — the time fraction spoils equality |
| Updates | On any recalculation (volatile) | Same — every recalc, so it creeps forward |
| Strip to a date | Already a date | INT(NOW()) or TRUNC(NOW()) |
| Compatibility | Universal | Universal (verified in every version we test) |
Which should you use?
- TODAY — Deadlines, ages, overdue flags — anything comparing DATES. Using NOW in a date comparison is the classic off-by-a-fraction bug.
- NOW — Displaying a live clock or computing hours-since. For a PERMANENT timestamp, use neither: press Ctrl+; (date) or Ctrl+Shift+; (time) to stamp a static value that won't update tomorrow.
Compatibility (Excel for the web, Sheets & LibreOffice executed; desktop Excel per docs)
Both are volatile and behave identically in every LibreOffice build and in the Google Sheets run we execute (desktop Excel per Microsoft's docs — we do not run desktop Excel) (our harness verifies NOW()>=TODAY() and NOW()-NOW()=0 as executed facts). Volatility has a cost: thousands of NOW/TODAY cells force full recalcs — reference one helper cell instead of repeating the call per row. Excel for the web is a separate application with its own calculation engine, and that one we do execute: all 6 corpus cases for these functions matched the documented values there (recalculated on OneDrive, 2026-09-01); the per-case values are on the individual function pages.
Example formulas
| Overdue test (correct — dates compared) | =A2<TODAY() |
| Hours since a timestamp | =(NOW()-A2)*24 |
| Today from NOW | =INT(NOW()) |
Full per-version details on each function page: TODAY · NOW.