Number of characters in a cell

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I have an user who is creating a table in Excel.
She has to type a large amount of text in one cell.
I know that a cell can hold 32000 characters but only display 1024 in the cell.
Is there a way around this? She has a little over 1060.
I know….a table in word would be better however someone else set this up and they like using excel.

Please advise…

Thanks,
Deborah

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Hi Deborah,

There is a bug in Excel versions prior to Excel 2007 that allows more than 1024 characters to be displayed if the cell is formatted as text, with an upper limit of around 1200 characters (the actual character limit depends on cell/font formatting). The catch is that cells formatted as text won’t display strings longer than 255 characters and shorter than 1024 characters. And, in Excel 2007, the bug has been fixed – cells formatted as text won’t display strings longer than 255 characters.

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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Add a linefeed within the text – either using Alt+Enter or CHAR(10) in a formula.

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Hi Rory,

I don’t think that overcomes the display limit (it doesn’t for me).

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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You could break it up into paragraphs of less than 1000 chars and put them into separate cells…

Steve

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Alternatively, one could put all the text into a borderless text box positioned over the corresponding cell. That allows as much text as anyone might ever want to display, neatly located in the correct location with no apparent cell breaks …

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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Thanks for all the suggestions.

I have basically told her the same. My best advice is to split the content up into multiple cells.

It is funny that you have the ability to type in 32000 characters and only see 1024 on the spreadsheet.

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