Maximum number of characters in merged cells

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Guest

Is there a maximum number of characters a merged cells will hold? I have a text field of merged cells however, after about 11 rows all of the text does not show even though it looks like there is room for the additional text.
 
Bill,
Do a search in help with "Specifications" and you will find:

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

Bernard

Bill said:
Is there a maximum number of characters a merged cells will hold? I have
Click to expand...
a text field of merged cells however, after about 11 rows all of the text
does not show even though it looks like there is room for the additional
text.
 
Hi Bill!

I suspect that the limit is the same as for a single cell:

Extract from Specifications:

32,767 characters. Only 1,024 display in a cell; all 32,767 display in
the formula bar.

--
Regards
Norman Harker MVP (Excel)
Sydney, Australia
(e-mail address removed)
Excel and Word Function Lists (Classifications, Syntax and Arguments)
available free to good homes.
Bill said:
Is there a maximum number of characters a merged cells will hold? I
Click to expand...
have a text field of merged cells however, after about 11 rows all of
the text does not show even though it looks like there is room for the
additional text.
 
You can have a cell that contains about 32k worth of characters, but left to its
own devices, excel will only show about 1000.

You can add alt-enters to force new lines within your cell and you can see more.

But with mergedcells, you'll have to adjust the rowheight yourself--it won't
react nicely to autofitting the rowheight.
 
I suspect that the limit is the same as for a single cell:

Extract from Specifications:

32,767 characters. Only 1,024 display in a cell; all 32,767 display in
the formula bar.
Click to expand...
...

And the specs are as accurate and complete as senior MSFT execs testimony in the
last antitrust trial.

If the cell evaluates to text with newline characters every 100-200 characters,
the typesize is small enough, and the column width and row height large enough,
Excel happily displays over 10,000 characters in a cell. Indeed, with column A's
width set to 150, rows 1:3s' height set to 409, cells A1:A3 merged, font set to
Arial with typesize 6, the formula

=REPT(REPT("#",254)&CHAR(10),128)&REPT("_",130)

happily displays all 32,767 characters that Excel is capable of displaying or
evaluating to. So much for specs. As for those who spout them uncritically, ...

Specs are only as good/accurate as the people who write them care about making
them. Based on evidence, Microsoft doesn't seem to give a damn about 'em.
 
Hi Harlan!

Since you hate Microsoft so much, I wonder why you keep using it <vbg>

--
Regards
Norman Harker MVP (Excel)
Sydney, Australia
(e-mail address removed)
Excel and Word Function Lists (Classifications, Syntax and Arguments)
available free to good homes.
 
Since you hate Microsoft so much, I wonder why you keep using it <vbg>
Click to expand...

No choice, at least not at work. Still, it's a challenge - so much either poorly
documented (this) or undocumented (array semantics of INDIRECT or OFFSET fed
array arguments). Suppose there's also some masochism. If only gnumeric were
ported to Windows!
 
Hi Harlan!

I suppose that we'll just have to try and work with Microsoft to try
and improve it. Stupid little things for a start like getting Help to
say that the limit on characters varies according to which characters
are used. Plus a tad more rigour with the statistics. We'll have to
lock the marketing guys up first.

--
Regards
Norman Harker MVP (Excel)
Sydney, Australia
(e-mail address removed)
Excel and Word Function Lists (Classifications, Syntax and Arguments)
available free to good homes.
 
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