Excel gets a date picker

Yippee! 🥳

Excel finally has a date picker 📅 — imitating another Google Sheets feature — except going above and beyond to ensure it’s a cut above.

At the moment, it’s only available to Excel for web users but will inevitably be rolled out to desktop in due course.

The advantage over Sheets’ effort is not only can you hop back and forward a month, but it’s much easier to navigate to older dates.

For example, double-clicking on a cell containing 02/12/2023 displays all the days belonging to the month. However, if you select ‘December 2023’ at the top, this changes to the year’s months. Another click reveals a batch of 12 years.

It’s an extreme example, but the process to reach 01/01/1900 is an arduous task in Sheets. Yes, if you wanted to input a date that old, you’d be better off typing it in, but the point remains.

Previously, we had to rely on the likes of Mini Calendar and Date Picker in the Office Add-ins store, which averages a 3-star rating. Or, my preference, which is available at Rad Sheets.

These aren’t terrible by any means, but they lack the polish and seamlessness you tend to get from native features.

Thankfully, Excel’s official date picker will negate the need to resort to anything else.

I do wish it didn’t use an archaic serif font, though, and had the option of an in-cell indicator so you can easily tell which are date-picker cells. It also annoyingly saves the state you put it in when you click off the cell, irrespective of the date.

Nevertheless, long overdue but much-welcomed, we gleefully await the full rollout!