I am completely new to Stata. I have imported a dataset of approximately 50 columns by 500,000 rows. About eight of the columns are dates in the format YMD , eg 2015-05-14. The dataset imports nicely but all of the dates are in red, I assume this means they are strings.
From the manual I have tried

generate eventdate = date(admidate, "YMD")
format eventdate %td

I am not sure if I am on the right track here, - I assumed that I need to convert the string to a date format that Stata understood?. This comment seems to go through but the data remains the same.
When I look at the date it is still red, – and when I look at the variable properties under format it says it is still %10s.

Can anyone get me on the right track please.