Maximum text length?

[L Buchy]

I have a spreadsheet with a cell formatted as text with word wrap turned on.
It appears to have some sort of limit as ### are being displayed even if
cell is made larger in size??

Is there some kind of text length maximum in Excel?? Or can you change this
some how?

Your help would be greatly appreciated,
Thx.

 

[Tom Ogilvy]

Just so you don't become Harlan bait, someone discovered that if you
manually go into the text and do hard returns (alt+enter) throughout your
data then reduce the font and stretch the cell to its limits you can get
double digit thousands of characters to display. I first saw Dave Peterson
post this (but don't know if he was the original source or Harlan or someone
else was), but then recently saw a long tirade by Harlan about how MS
doesn't have accurate help blah blah blah.

Of course they demo this with a REPT formula which has a lot of practical
application. Personally, I don't see myself hand formatting cells with 32K
characters, but they are technically correct.

 

[Tom Ogilvy]

Don't format the cell as Text. Format it as General and I believe it will
remove the ### and wrap as you wish. I think you get this behavior when it
is formatted as text and the length exceeds 255 characters.

 

[J.E. McGimpsey]

Thanks, Tom.

I knew about alt-enter, so should have mentioned it... OTOH, I try
never to encourage people to use XL as a word processor.

 

[steve]

Tom,

Working with Excel97 I just put 6,000 characters into a cell and didn't get
the ### (formatted as General or Text). Of course not everything was
displayed.

Did find that when formatted as Text the ### showed up when
the length was 256 to 1024 characters. Any less or any more and it
displayed correctly. Now that is what I call strange!!!

 

[Tom Ogilvy]

Good information. Did not examine the behavior that closely.

Regards,
Tom Ogilvy

 

[steve]

Tom,

Thanks!

But!!! Any idea of what is going on here?
Why the ###'s in the first place?
And what's magic about 256 to 1024?

Curious minds are still curious...

 

[Tom Ogilvy]

I would imagine it is residual from prevous versions. Text strings used to
be restricted to 255 characters - formulas could be up to 1024 (current
limit). I suspect it has something to do with that.

 

[staylor17]

We are trying to use links between workbook cells in excel to tie a
number of forms together and find that text data is getting truncated.
I am confused about the rules that should apply- should we expect
truncation at 255 or at 3K+? And if we should expect truncation at
255, is there any workaround that does *not* involve writing a MACRO?

Thanks in advance for the help. We're puzzled.