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Shannon Jacobs Shannon Jacobs is offline
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Default Disappearing text in Excel cells

Dave Peterson wrote:
If you mean you see ###'s (not XXX's), then...

It could mean a few things.

1. The columnwidth is too narrow to show the number.

Widen the column or change the font size of that cell. Or change
the numberformat to General.


No. I said text.


2. You have a date/time in that cell and it's negative

Don't use negative dates. If excel was helping you, it may have
changed the format to a date. Change it back to General (or some
other number format).

If you need to see negative date/times:
Tools|options|Calculation Tab|and check 1904 date system
(but this can cause trouble--watch what happens to your dates
and watch what happens when you copy|paste dates to a different
workbook that doesn't use this setting)


No. I said text.

3. You have a lot of text in the cell, the cell is formatted as Text.

Format the cell as general.


Tried both.

4. You really have ###'s in that cell.

Clean up that cell.


No.

5. You have # in a cell, but it's format is set to Fill.

Change the format
(format|cells|alignment tab|horizontal box, change it to General.


No.

I'm trying to assume that you had good intentions, but your response was not
helpful in any way. Not even the slightest approach to utility, and it could
easily be taken as an insult to my intelligence. Please don't project. It
makes me wonder why you aren't an MVP. If you have nothing useful to say, it
is much better that you say nothing.

The following question remains unaddressed regarding text disappearing from
cells in Excel. If there were a useful question in the "response", I'd be
glad to provide more data, but I can't think of what else to add. Perhaps it
is useful to know that some of the strings were relatively short, while
others were very long. Upon reflection, I suspect there might be hidden
characters pasted in from some other program, but I just gave up on using
Excel for the task, and pasted the afflicted cells into Word, where they
arrived without any apparent damage. (Or if anything had disappeared, at
least it wasn't flashing on and off, so I never noticed it.)

Shannon Jacobs wrote:

Actually, the text hasn't gone anywhere, but it just becomes
invisible or turns into a row of XXXXs when you leave the cell.
Clicking in the cell makes it visible again--but only until you
leave.

I've found a lot of threads that discuss various aspects and
manifestations of the problem. Many people think it is related to
text wrapping, but I'm not sure about that. I am sure that it is not
related to the size of the text. At least not directly. Many of the
threads suggested various workarounds that are supposed to make it
go away, but I've tried a bunch of them, and no joy.

Microsoft "support" website was useless, as usual.

Anyone able to explain what's going on here? Yet another fix?