Cell Character Limits (Excel 2000)

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We’re running into the cell character limit (I forget what the number is) alot in a specific spreadsheet. The author insists that it MUST be in Excel. We’ve been using alt+enter at the end of lines in the cell to force it to accept more text than the limit; it won’t show it onscreen, but it will print. However, this is a very limiting option.

Does anyone know of any way to make Excel cells accept more characters? Does Microsoft (or another vendor) have any add-ins?

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Set the format to General and see if that helps.

Approx how amny characters sre you trying to show ?

Andrew C

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Nope. Same result. I’m generally going 100-300 characters over the limit.

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If you need to exceed the TextBox limits Sammy mentions, the next alternative is to insert a Word Object. The results ain’t pretty, but they’re in there.

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You cannot exceed Excel specifications. See Help | Index | Specification | Microsoft Excel specifications, then click on Worksheet & Workbook specifications.

Max column width: 255 characters
Max length of a formula: 1024
Max length of cell text: 32,767 (but only 1024 are displayed in the cell)

The only way that I know to display large amounts of text is with a textbox; however there is a limit there of appromimately 2,000 characters and they must be moved into the textbox 255 characters or less at a time. See Q148815 for macro code to do this. HTH –Sam

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Just found another long character string limitation in VBA and thought I’d add it to this thread. If you are in the habit of moving date from one cell to another with cell1 = cell2, this witll give a #VALUE! in cell2 for long (>255?) character strings at least in XL97. If you anticipate having long character strings, be sure to have the code be

cell1 = cell2.Value

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If you go to Format Cell, then click on the Alignment tab you can then select Wrap Text you should be able to display about 1024 characters. I don’t know of any way to exceed that.

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Back in December, there was a thread on copying Word tables whose cells had Enter characters within them to Excel. I posted a soln to that at thus URL.

In there I noted the 256-char limit also and observed that my Word table cell had >400 characters in it and that Excel had no problem with this. I didn’t get as high as Legare’s 1024 with word wrap.

I also noted there was a max ht of a row of 409.50 points (at least in excel 97).

So maybe start in Word and use my macro to move the table to excel.

hope some of this is of use.

fred

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This would be a reason to move to Access.

Cheers

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