Most articles that discuss such topics as improving performance and tuning code preach that using Variants is bad. In most cases, this is good advice because a Variant takes up more storage space than other dedicated data types do and often requires more processing muscle to move the data around.
The downside to this advice is that it puts many people off using Variants for life. I once asked a programmer why he had used a string to store a date instead of a Variant(7) and was told that his project recently went through a “firefighting” exercise to tune the code, and all Variants had been converted to their “real” data types. The fact that the date value in question was used only about nine times in the whole program didn’t occur to him.
The point to remember here is that the Variant(7) and Date data types were introduced to provide more efficient and, above all, more accurate date handling. If somebody gives you a lighter, will you continue to rub sticks to make fire?