Memos or Comments in Excel

[Woody]

Thank you for any anticipated help.

I am using Excel 2007. I am an Access developer. Sometimes I have clients
that want to keep notes (memos) on things in a database. Maybe they are in
disparate locations, so the question becomes how to do it easily. They could
use Access but when people are spread out geographically, this has its
problems. It occurred to me, however, that using a spreadsheet might be an
option along with Office Live.

Unlike Access, an Excel spreadsheet is easily accessible in Office Live.
But I am not sure how (if) Excel (Excel 2007) deals with fields that have the
potential to be long. Longer than 255 characters. In Access it's thought of
as a memo field. Don't know how it's thought of or referred to in Excel.

I have a couple of questions. The first is, how long can a comment be?

Second. Does Excel support anything like an Accees Memo field where the
memo can be as long as needed and also have formatting with line breaks and
bolding etc.

Third: Does anyone know of a web site or white paper that may give me more
inforamtion?

Thank you again for your help.

 

[Shane Devenshire]

The first is, how long can a comment be? - at least 32K characters

Second. Does Excel support anything like an Accees Memo field where the
memo can be as long as needed and also have formatting with line breaks and
bolding etc. - a regular cell supports
2003:
Cells can contain 1024 characters in a formula
Cells can contain 32,767 text characters but only the first 1023 will be
visible (unless you use Alt Enter to force line breaks)

2007:
Cells can contain 8192 characters in formulas
Cells can contain 32,767 text characters in cells and all can be seen and
printed without needing to use Alt Enter.

Third: Does anyone know of a web site or white paper that may give me more
inforamtion? - try Help, Specifications

 

[JLatham]

Woody,
Excel doesn't have a specific Memo type. A cell can be set to type "Text"
(or an entry can be forced to text by preceding it with a single apostrophe,
as
'12345 would be text not numeric
and the apostrophe doesn't appear on screen.
However, there are limits. Where a Memo field is virtually unlimited in
size, the most a cell can contain is 32K worth of text, and in pre-Excel 2007
versions, only the 1st 1K characters will appear without taking special
measures such as forcing linefeeds into the text.

If the memo from Access had linefeeds in it, they should come across into
the Excel cell (if I remember correctly).

A cell's .WrapText property can be set to true to provide multiple lines for
long text, but you need to also consider the width and height of the cell;
needs to be wider than normal to stop from being just a very tall, thin
cell/row. That usually involves some pre-sheet/cell formatting although it
can be done in code.

Might just try a web search for 'long text in Excel' to see what is
available that might help you out.

 

[Woody]

Thank you both for your help for your help.