What potential pitfalls should be considered when manually parsing and formatting dates for Excel in PHP?

When manually parsing and formatting dates for Excel in PHP, potential pitfalls to consider include different date formats, time zones, and daylight saving time adjustments. To avoid these issues, it's important to standardize the date format before parsing it and ensure consistency in time zones throughout the process.

// Example code snippet for parsing and formatting dates for Excel in PHP

$date = "2022-05-15";
$excel_date = date('Y-m-d', strtotime($date));

echo $excel_date;