>I am gathering data from an Excel 2010 workbook into VFP 9 SP2 using ODBC via SQLSTRINGCONNECT(). The cursor created by SQLEXEC() creates two columns of data (among many other columns) that should be of the same data type, but one is coming into VFP as data type "B" (double) and the other as data type "M" (Memo). The double field is causing me to loose the character data that also resides in the column.

You're letting the ODBC driver decide the type of data for each column. You can't really know what it will do. I've seen Excel do weird things (search my blog for Excel), and I expect the driver comes from the same kitchen.

The only sure-fire way that I've found for retrieving data from Excel is automation, using .cell(nRow, nCol).text, and sometimes .cell(nRow, nCol).value (but .value is often buggy - Excel may interpret some cells as numbers, even though most of the column contains strings).