The Finder is generally pretty good at reformatting the data column to show dates without truncation. Give it enough space, and it will display the date as “Friday, November 23, 2007, 12:52 PM.” A little less and it is supposed to drop the Friday part. A little less and it switches to a numeric format.
Unfortunately, it seems less than perfect. Sometimes it keeps the long format with columns that are too narrow, as seen in the following picture:
Why? I don’t know. It seems they put so much effort into this already, it’s hard to imagine why they didn’t make the final push to make date columns always usable.
Radar #5612934.