MySQL reads Date columns in Excel as DateTime?

I'm trying to export Excel sheets to MySQL as new table using the plugin. The export fails on "MySQL error 1064" when I tried to change the data type to Date. I have a few columns in Excel that are formatted as Short Date, although some of them are generated by functions like =TODAY(), some are numbers like "42445", etc. But all of them date type not Date Time. For example it bothers me that MySQL detects '1/1/2016' in Excel as '1/1/2016 12:00:00 AM' as VarChar(225). And whenever I changed the type to Date the error message mentioned above appears. I did try to re-format the columns in spreadsheet to YYYY-MM-DD but MySQL always convert them to MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS Thanks in advance for any help. MySQL for Excel 1.3.6 Office 2016 32-bit edit: this looks more like the plugin's bug of this version https://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=80079