A special data type that can contain numeric, string, or date data as well as user-defined types and the special values Empty and Null. The Variant data type has a numeric storage size of 16 bytes and can contain data up to the range of a Decimal, or a character storage size of 22 bytes (plus string length), and can store any character text. The VarType function defines how the data in a Variant is treated. All variables become Variant data types if not explicitly declared as some other data type.