Excel 2003 - Maximum number of characters a cell can contain?

[Lenny]

I was given a document in Excel 2003 to clean up. Some of the cells have
easily, several hundred characters. Think big paragraphs. Not all of the
text is appearing in the cell, probably half. If I double click on the cell,
all of the text is visible, but when I click off, only half is showing. Is
there a maximum number of characters that a cell can display? I have perused
the boards and there are members that seem to have similar problems, but I
don't really see any solutions or reasons for the text not displaying. I
have played with the cell properties (alignment) in all sorts of combinations
and can't get all the text to display in the cell. My solution at this point
is to copy the text not showing to a blank cell below and tighten up the row
height so it looks like one paragraph. Does anyone have a fix or reason for
this? Answers are always appreciated. Regards - Lenny

 

[Dave Peterson]

In xl2003, each cell can hold about 32 thousand characters -- but unless you do
something special, only about 1000 will show up in the cell (all will appear in
the formula bar -- like you've seen).

That something special is to add alt-enters (to force a new line within the
cell) every 80-100 characters.

Then depending on the font, you'll be able to see lots more. (You may have to
adjust the rowheight manually, though.)

You can use =len(a1) to see how many the length of the string in A1.

==========
But if you really have lots of this text like stuff, you may want to consider
using a real word processor -- like MSWord. You'll get the added benefit of all
the word processing tools, too.