No.  The Help page for Excel 2003 says the same thing.

If you enter, 4/27/2008 into a cell, normally that is not entered as
text per se.  Instead, Excel interprets that as a date and enters its
"serial number" into the cel.  You will see that if you format the
cell as Number.

If you enter the text `4/27/2008 (not the leading apostrophe), it
might look the same (depending on format options).  But Excel does not
always treat it the same way -- although sometimes we get away with
it.  One way to do this by accident is to enter 4/27/2008 into a cell
that was previously formatted as Text.

I don't know if the Excel 2007 is any more or less tolerant of dates
in text form than Excel 2003.

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