text show as ######

[Leo Lin]

Hi,

I have a cell in Text format with "wrap text" enabled, And I copy from
notepad multiple lines of text. The cell turns to show "################",
Can anyone tell me why and how to make it show the correct text?

Thanks a lot.

-- Leo

 

[Gord Dibben]

Leo

Change the format to General. Usually clears this up.

Gord Dibben Excel MVP

 

[Leo Lin]

It works! Thank you.

But I'm still curious why?

-- Leo

 

[David McRitchie]

Know what you had for a format and value beforehand must be helpful
but might get a slight insight with
HELP (F1), Index, #
if you have Excel 2003 try the answer wizard in Help.

 

[Dave Peterson]

With the cell formatted as text:

1-255 characters work ok
256-1024 characters give ####'s
1025+ and you're ok again.

Tom Ogilvy guessed that it had something to do with early versions of excel that
only supported 255 characters in a cell and that maybe the 1024 character limit
for formulas (measured in R1C1 reference style) had an affect, too.

It seems like a very reasonable explanation to me.