Getting Excel To Count Text Entries

I want to learn how to program excel to do this :

1) Type in a text data in a predesignated entry box

2) Excel automatically inserts that text into a table

3) If that text is already in the table, then adds a counter next to it (or increases the counter by one)

4) Excels then clears the text data in the entry box

Basically, I want to tabulate the number of times a specific entry comes up, and it would be much faster if I can just type it in, press enter, and let excel do the rest. It would be ideal if I can also add a date to that entry, so the data table comes up to something like a date vs the entries table, and the intersection would be the number of times each entry comes up on that day.