Some fields are masked.  This means they contain formatting information.

Date and Time fields are both masked.  The punctuation appears automatically and inappropriate information will be rejected.  The slashes will not appear properly, however, if you fail to type in leading zeros.  So September 4th should be typed in as 0904.  If you type the year in as 2 digits, such as 00 for 2000, the computer will make an assumption about what century you intend and fill in a 4 digit year.  Typing in all 4 digits of the year is a foolproof method of insuring the right year, but typing in 2 digits will work too as long as you remember to look to see that the computer completed the date as you intended.

Social Security number fields and telephone number fields are also masked.  With telephone numbers, entering a ( as the first character to precede the area code will allow you to simply key in the digits and the program will add the spaces and punctuation.