KACE Product Support

I am looking to format a date in a report so Excel will pick it up as a date and apply "group filtering" to the column. Is there a way to make this happen?

These are things I've tried with no success. 

       DATE_FORMAT(w.START_DATE, '%m/%d/%Y') as SHIP_DATE, 

       DATE_FORMAT(w.START_DATE, '%m-%d-%Y') as SHIP_DATE, 

       DATE_FORMAT(w.START_DATE, '%m%d%Y') as SHIP_DATE, 

       DATE_FORMAT(w.START_DATE, '%Y/%m/%d') as SHIP_DATE, 

       DATE_FORMAT(w.START_DATE, '%Y-%m-%d') as SHIP_DATE, 

       DATE_FORMAT(w.START_DATE, '%Y-%d-%m') as SHIP_DATE, 

Additionally, I ran into some funky things when trying to format the date, for example (these we're from the same computer):

DATE_FORMAT(w.START_DATE, '%Y-%m-%d') as SHIP_DATE

returns

09/25/2014 00:00:00

Another Example: 

DATE_FORMAT(w.START_DATE,'%Y-%d-%m') as SHIP_DATE, 

Returns

12/31/1969 19:00:00