I see the comments about this problem, but it seems to me that if a cell were
already defined as a date it should be able to determine that a date were
being entered without it requiring the slashes. Or another way of making it
easier than having to enter the slashes would be preferable, for example
entering a d103106 or d10312006 would be much easier than having to do the
10/31/2006 which requires a lot more of hand movement on the keyboard to drop
down and hit the slash key than it would if a simple d103106 could result in
10/31/2006 according to the date format selected. It just slows down data
entry a lot!

Perhaps Microsoft should be listening since there seem to be many of us who
would opt for a simpler method of entering a date.