>Al --
>
>The real pitfall in your suggestion is not the original entry of the value, but the re-entry.
>
>Excel is smart enough to remember that you entered a leading quote mark when you go back to a field.
>
>Property Window and PEMEditor can store nothing but the value, which means that they cannot remember whether a leading quote mark was entered.
>
>Thus, on re-entry of a value, you'd either always lose the original quote (oops!) or always have a leading quote (oops!).

If you're editing an existing value, does the PEM editor not know the previous type?

Suppose you have a string value "1.00" that you want to change to "1.10".

If you select the first zero and overwrite it with 1, or delete it/type in a 1 then the editor could leave it as a string.

If you prefer to delete the entire previous value, then enter "1.10", then you'd have to once again put in a leading ' to prevent the type being changed to numeric.