clipboard copy doesn't work

[david]

(USING OFFICE XP: EXCEL)

I have a string that is more than 255 characters long in
Excel so it gets displayed as bunch of pound signs (#).
That is ok, but when I select that cell and copy (Ctrl +
C), all the pound signs get copied to the clipboard. It
also writes out all the pound signs when i save the file
in a text format (like .csv, comma-delimited). This is
extremely irritating because it means I am going to have
to write a macro to sift through the thousands of rows of
my excel file and write out the values to a text file. I
understand why you would want to display pound signs for
longer strings but writing the pound signs to the
clipboard or an output text file is just poor programming.

 

[Jim Rech]

The reason you see pound signs is because the cell has the Text number
format. Switch to General and they will go away (Format, Cells, Number tab,
General)