Insert The Date and Time With A Keyboard Shortcut

Your Mac has some fantastic shortcuts and workarounds to allow you to get things done faster. Today’s quick tip is inserting the time and date with a shortcut. It uses the built in Services options that come with your Mac. It only takes two seconds to enable and allows you to write the full date, time as well as the short date with a keystroke. Comes in very useful if you find you are writing the date frequently.
To enable this service open System Preferences. Select the keyboard option, and then “Keyboard Shortcuts” from the tab options. Within the left hand options select “Services”. Within the list that appears in the right hand box select “Long Date”, “Long Date & Time”, “Short Date”, “Short Date & Time” or “Time”. You can add and remove as many as you want. When you select the options they will appear in [App] > Services menu, if the application supports the function.

Adding the date, time is now easy with the services menu option.

The keyboard options allow you to enter them with a keystroke. The long date is in the following format: Day in Words, day number, month, year. For example: Monday, 2 April 2012. The short date is day/month/year. This may depend on you system set up.
It isn’t much harder than that. The service menu will appear any time your Mac recognises a text box, so will work in app such as Mail and Safari to name a few. It is only a simple feature but something I use regularly.

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