TIA Portal 15 vs. 17 Use of Characters

I'm hoping someone can help me. I've taken some reference HMI reference screens given to me by a customer that were developed in TIA Portal v15.1 and I'm struggling with a tag that (apparently) used to work, but doesn't seem to in v17.1. The tag is meant to be used as an input/output of a single character, displayed as a string. I've attached some screenshots that show the use of the tag in v15 and also in v17. My TIA Portal doesn't like the use of the 'char' type being displayed as a string. I tried to create an HMI tag that is in the same style as the original tag, to no avail. Unfortunately, I cannot change the type in the customer's data block. Can anyone offer up a suggestion? I'd greatly appreciate it as I'm stumped.

Scratch that. I was able to copy the HMI tags verbatim from one application to the other and then reference the correct DB location. Problem solved!