To quote the legendary MVP John Vinson:
"Access stores Date/Time fields as floating point numbers, counts of
days and fractions of a day (times) since midnight, December 30, 1899.
The format merely controls how the value is displayed, not what's stored."
and
"Because in Access a Date/Time value is NOT A STRING. It's stored
internally as a double floating point count of days from a start
point; it can be formatted in many ways but underneath it's still just
a number."