>I have a very simple file with only a few records at a time to export to a spreadsheet, and use the following to achieve this:
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>copy to xyz type xl5 
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>All worked fine until I had to add a date field.
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>Can anyone tell me how to get the column in the spreadsheet to also be a date field
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>Many thanks!

There should be no problem at all, with both date and datetime data types. Just remember that, in Excel, date, datetime, and time are numbers, and you can represent them as such. What are you getting / viewing when you open the Excel document, and what should be there?