Copy and paste will work as the clipboard takes what it sees (kind
of!), and you can even use copy and paste in the macro, but I would not
recommend it. I agree that it's the use of strings, but there is no
need to use strings

AppWd.bookmarks("Fred").range=range("A1").value

works just as well as storing the value of the cell in a variable first

BUT you don't actually need to use the value

AppWd.bookmarks("Fred").range=range("A1").text

would give you the formatted text