Excel formulas to create large blocks of text

[Greg Boettcher]

I can't seem to use formulas in Excel 97 to produce blocks of text that
are bigger than about 1000 characters. I have gotten around the length
restrictions of the formulas themselves by doing a lot of concatenating
of strings, but I have found no way to increase the volume of text that
a formula generates. Instead of 1000 characters, I need about 3500
characters. Is there any way to achieve this?

Thank you to whoever can help me with this.

Greg

 

[Guest]

Hi Greg-

From Excel 2000 Help (I believe this applies to '97 as well);

Length of cell contents (text) 32,767 characters. Only 1,024 display in a
cell; all 32,767 display in the formula bar.

HTH |:>)

 

[Dave Peterson]

If you insert alt-enters in your text (or &char(10)& in your formulas) every
80-100 characters or so, then you can see lots more than the document 1k number
of characters.

 

[Greg Boettcher]

If you insert alt-enters in your text (or &char(10)& in your formulas) every
80-100 characters or so, then you can see lots more than the document 1k number
of characters.

It isn't a question at all of how much I can see. I'm trying to copy
the contents of the cell and paste it to a text file. It's not working.
I'm only getting about 1000 characters.

I gather that what I want to do is not possible, but if somebody knows
otherwise, please let me know.

Thanks for the reply.

Greg

 

[Dave Peterson]

It was possible for me.

I put this in a cell:

=rept("a",32767)

I copied (with a simple ctrl-c) that cell and pasted into my favorite text
editor (UltraEdit32) and got 32767 characters.

Maybe it's the other program that you're pasting into???

 

[Greg Boettcher]

It was possible for me.

I put this in a cell:

=rept("a",32767)

I copied (with a simple ctrl-c) that cell and pasted into my favorite text
editor (UltraEdit32) and got 32767 characters.

Maybe it's the other program that you're pasting into???

Thanks a lot, Dave. Finally I have isolated the problem. As you pointed
out, the problem does not happen with just any Excel formula, but it
can happen in extreme cases like mine. (I was concatenating a lot of
cells, and those cells themselves consisted of a bunch of formulas.) I
finally did find a way around the problem by copying and pasting the
values to another part of the spreadsheet.

Anyway, thanks again for your help. You got me moving in the right
direction.

Greg