Entering lots of dates without having to physically key the / (forward slash)

Solution 1:

Format your cells with the following custom format and you can then type in the consecutive numbers without typing the /.

00\/00\/000

For instance, if you type 12152015, when you leave the cell it will appear as 12/15/2015.

The caveat is this will be seen as a number, not a date.

Solution 2:

Excel (unlike Access) does not have input masks.

You could use the formula below to convert the number 5121943 to the date 5/12/1943. You may need to specifically format the formula result as a date.

=DATE(MOD(A1, 10000),TRUNC(A1/1000000), MOD(TRUNC(A1/10000), 100))

Note: Rather than being flagged with an error, an invalid input date (not in mmddyyyy) will not display as intended:

13131948 ... 1/13/1949
  612015 ... 1/30/2015

Solution 3:

You can get down to 3-8 keystrokes per date if you type them in the format dd-mm, or mm-yy for unambiguous 1st-of-the-month dates (i.e. where yy > 12), or dd-mm-yy for dates not within the current year and not on the 1st of the month. Numbers less than 10 can be entered as single digits. This will not apply the format you want, so you need to do that in advance (preferably to the whole column in one go) or after you've finished.

For (uniformly distributed) dates within the current year, this approach only requires on average 3.96 keystrokes per date, including the - characters - twice as fast as the methods in the other answers. The other special cases are also slightly faster.