That other stuff with MM/DD/YYYY hh:nn is just a display date or an input mask used for convert dates to or from strings. Internally, you do better with dates. They are faster and easier to compare and take up less space, since a date is 8 bytes as a DOUBLE but MM/DD/YYYY HH:NN is 16 bytes as text.
It is worse than that. Let's just take two dates:
10/01/18 and 12/31/17 if you compare the actual stored values, the October date will be greater. However if you do a string compare - character by character, left-to right, 12 is > 10 so the December date would be greater even though it is from the previous year. This is why it is sooooooooooo important to not format dates when you want to sort them or compare them.
For folks in the UK, there is one situation where you MUST format a date. That is when you are creating an SQL string that includes a date value. The reason for this is because SQL ASSUMES a US date format of month, day, year. In the UK and other countries, the typical order is day, month, year so in this instance and in this instance ONLY, you must format your date to mm/dd/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd specifically.
Select * from mytable where Mydate = Forms!myform!mydate
works fine as long as the mydate control is a datetime data type.
However if you build this query in code, you must format it because strSQL is a string and so will not contain a date object.
strSQL = "Select * from mytable where mydate = #" & format(Me.mydate, "yyyy/mm/dd") & "#;"