I suspect the problem he was experiencing was in the import parser. So it just passed through a text string.
Aren’t the lat/long format validation conversions applied only when the field is selected in an input form?
Paul’s solution resolves this particular problem. (Thank you! I was hoping one of the Python reformatting tools for fixing Ancestrologie GEDCOM oddnesses might have addressed the same issue. But the archival domain appears to be gone.)
But haven’t there been a bunch of similar issues raised before? Where an import didn’t resolve a data incompatibility that the direct data entry handles easily? And where a solution (when there were just a few offending records) was to activate the ‘bad’ field in the Object Editor and press Enter to force a re-validation?
It seems like a general re-validate tool that automated that process could future-proof against such issues. If course, it might also be a slow & dangerous process.