It would seem simple enough. I am reading an Excell spreadsheet directly with VFP 8. Some of the columns in the .XLS file come over as currency type I guess because they are formatted in Excell with the dollar sign. In order to insert the values (m.cost1, etc.) into my table I need to convert them to numeric. In VFP 9 I could use cast() but this is 8. The only way I could find was to use:

if type('mNumVal') = 'Y'
  * Currency type
  mNumVal = val(str(mNumVal,10,3))
endif

I was just wondering if there is a better way in VFP 8.
TIA