In SAS the word FORMAT means the instructions for how to convert the values into text, for example when printing the values in a report.
SAS has only two types of variables floating point numbers and fixed length character strings. Your original values are numbers, like 201,304 or 201,412. SAS stores DATE values as the number of days since 1960, so over 200 thousand days would be almost 500 years into the future.
So do you want to convert those numbers into character strings? Or date values?
data have;
input date;
cards;
201304
201406
201409
201412
201311
;
data want;
set have;
length new_date $7. date_value 8;
new_date=put(date,z6.);
new_date=catx('/',substr(new_date,1,4),substr(new_date,5));
date_value=input(put(date,z6.),yymmn6.);
format date_value YYMMS7.;
run;
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