Date Formatted as General then pasted into Excel Table in Actual Date Format

This is really simple but really confusing.

I have a list of dates in one excel workbook in General Format (I have no choice about this as it's a system export). I want to paste them into another workbook that contains a table. Now usually I thought that new data into an Excel table would take on the properties/format of the existing data in the table. However the dates during this paste look as though they have converted in the format dialogue but actually remain as General no matter what I do.

The only way I can get them to act as dates once in the table, is to use Text-to-Columns but this is not a practice I want to introduce for people using the sheet.

Am I missing something dead obvious?

Is there no other way to make it automatic? The people using this will never remember to do that.