Factory Talk View Migration - Strings

Good Morning. I'm migrating an old PB32 application onto Factory Talk View Studio (A PV+ 1000) so we get improved alarm logging. The PLC is an SLC500 and the problem I am having is that within the PLC there is quite a lot of text data stored in 'N' files. I've set up my string tag to read 6 characters from, say, N50:21, but on the screen I get '??????' displayed. I've tried not using a tag and just accessing N50:21 directly to my object, but then I get the first two bytes (because I've not specified a read length) represented as a number instead of the implied ascii, ie 12345 instead of '09'. PB32 coped with this no problem, and as I can't find any reference to this I suspect Factory Talk does but I'm being daft. The PLC is running an assembly line in a car plant so I can't add 'A' type data files in as reloading the PLC isn't really an option. Advice please!

Welcome!
Text would normally be stored in a String file ST while Integers would be stored in N type data files.

If possible post both PB32 and RSLogix500 programs zipped first.

Hope this helps.

Bob, The line/machine has 'evolved' over a long period of time to be where it's at today - I'm not really in a position to start moving the text around so it's all in 'ST' or 'A' type files. PB32 evaluated a byte as a byte and would display in whatever format you told it to, however the new fangled FT View ME seems to interpret the 'N' file only as a number. Is there a way to 'force' the HMI software to interpret the 'number' as ASCII?