Reading an Excel cell range into Pandas DF does not format date columns correctly

[lvphj]

When using phjReadDataFromExcelNamedCellRange() function to read a named cell range from Excel into a Pandas dataframe, date-formatted columns are correctly identified and are displayed in the correct format in the dataframe but the dtype of the column is object rather than datetime. So, although the date appears in the correct format, it is, in fact, only stored in the dataframe as a string object.