Hey! You can change the date format in your database’s remote preferences file.
As for excel changing the values, that is annoying and something I also deal with. It’s an unfortunate feature that has nothing to do with specify and everything to do with the way Excel handles date values / imports data from CSVs. You’ll notice if you open the CSV exported by specify in a text editor or CSV reader like ModernCSV that the values don’t change.
One thing you can do to combat this is configuring your exports of date values in 3 separate fields (Year, Month, Day) in the query builder. This is not ideal but does keep data from getting mangled or ever being ambiguous.