Time Formatting

[Tsukinara]

I recently changed my system time format to be (yyyy.mm.dd).

However, when I use CTRL+; in Excel, the cell no longer recognizes as a date and does not translate it as a date format.
Is there any way I can have Excel automatically translate an input of, say, 2013.06.27 to the date format of 41452?
Thanks

[ramananhrm]

Use this shortcut - Ctrl + 1 & Navigate to 'Number' > 'Date' & finally you can change the format. If you want to modify the format, then you can go for Custom.

or

Use this function
=TEXT(A1,"yyyy/mm/dd")

[Tsukinara]

This is not the problem I am having right now.
When I press CTRL+;, it automatically fills the cell with today's date in the system format, or '2013.10.15'

However, Excel treats this as a string instead of a date.
What I was wondering is how to have Excel recognize the string '2013.10.15' as a date and format it.