Quote Originally Posted by snb View Post
That text doesn't match the locals window in Excel's VBeditor.
I do not think that is true. The locals window says Variant/String which I believe means that the variable was declared as, or default to being, a Variant and it currently holds a String value... that says nothing about what Format or Format$ returned, only what ended up in the Variant variable in the end. Assigning a pure String value to a Variant won't convert the Variant to a String... it is still a Variant and that Variant currently contains a String value. For example, if you did this...

x4 = "123"

the locals window still reports Variant/String. Similarly, if you did this...

x5 = CInt(123#)

the locals window would say Variant/Integer meaning the variable was declared as, or defaulted to being, a Variant which currently holds an Integer value. The testing at the following link was for the compiled version of VB, so I do not know how convincing its result will be to you given we are talking about VBA within Excel, but I offer it to you to show that, at least originally, there was a difference between using the $ and leaving it off of String functions...

Faster Visual Basic Programs