Visual Basic for Applications:
Getting the current date

How to:

Retrieving the current date in VBA is straightforward, using the Date function, while the Now function provides both the current date and time. Here’s how you can work with both:

Sub GetCurrentDate()
    ' Using the Date function to get the current date
    Dim currentDate As Date
    currentDate = Date
    Debug.Print "Current Date: "; currentDate
    
    ' Using the Now function to get the current date and time
    Dim currentDateTime As Date
    currentDateTime = Now
    Debug.Print "Current Date and Time: "; currentDateTime
End Sub

When you run this macro, the Debug.Print method outputs the current date and the current date and time to the Immediate Window in the VBA editor. For instance:

Current Date: 4/12/2023
Current Date and Time: 4/12/2023 3:45:22 PM

Keep in mind that the date format might vary based on the system settings of the user’s computer.

Deep Dive

The Date and Now functions encapsulate the complexity of dealing with date and time in Visual Basic for Applications, providing an application-level abstraction that makes working with dates simple and intuitive. Historically, dealing with date and time in programming has been fraught with challenges, including handling different time zones, daylight saving changes, and various date formats.

In VBA, these functions rely on the underlying system’s date and time, which means they are influenced by the user’s locale and system settings. It’s a double-edged sword that ensures consistency with the user’s environment but also necessitates careful handling of localization and time zone adjustments in global applications.

While VBA’s date and time functions are perfectly suitable for many applications, especially within the scope of Office automation, they may lack the precision or granularity required for more complex applications like high-frequency trading systems or scientific simulations. In such cases, other programming environments or languages like Python or C# might offer more sophisticated date and time manipulation libraries.

Nonetheless, for the vast majority of tasks involving dates and times in the context of Excel, Word, or other Office applications, VBA’s Date and Now functions offer a balance of simplicity, performance, and ease of use that is hard to beat.