The attached VS2008 example shows how to read and write to an Excel worksheet where the data types are double and string.
Compile/run, press the add then update button which demos inserting rows into a newly created Excel file. Once the update has completed a dialog is displayed showing the field types. Since I control the creation of the file and worksheet along with knowing the data types the update works but let's say I did not know the data type then that could very well be an issue.