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Dave Peterson Dave Peterson is offline
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Default Disappearing text in Excel cells

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.

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)

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

Format the cell as general.

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

Clean up that cell.

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.

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?


--

Dave Peterson