How do I get more than 255 characters into a cell?

[Haug]

How do I get excel to accept more than 255 characters of text into a cell?

I'm downloading 1000's of lines of data out of another program and into
excel. One of the columns in each line is text. The text in many of these
lines exceeds 20,000 characters. The text that appears in excel (both the
cell and the formula bar) is extremely limited - my guess is the first 255
characters only. I'll be transferring the data into another program, so I do
not care if I can see all 20,000+ characteers on my excel spreadsheet. I
just need the characters to be in the cell so that I can transfer them into
the other program.

I've tried the excel help function (just says that the limit is 255
characters). I've formatted the column as "general". I'm using excel 2003.
I know all the characters are being transferred out of the old program
because I have the option to "print" or transfer the data. When I print the
data I get all 20,000+ characters.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Sheeloo]

Do you have access to Excel 2007/ It supports upto 32,767 characters in a cell.

What is the input format expected by your program to which you are exporting
the data from Excel?

Can you bypass Excel?

 

[Sheeloo]

Excel 2003 may also have more than 255 characters...

What was the value against 'Total number of characters that a cell can
contain' in the Help file?

After importing test with the LEN function to see how many are there...

 

[Dave Peterson]

xl95 was the last version that only allowed 255 characters per cell.

If you use:
=len(a1)
where A1 contains the string to measure, what is returned?

My bet is that it's not excel that's storing the data incorrectly. It's the
process that retrieved the data that is limiting the string length.

You may want to explain how you're retrieving that data.