thanks for your reply Jim, your suggestion has solved the problem.

"Jim Cone" wrote:

One possible reason from MS....

XL2000: Importing Text File Truncates Fields Longer Than 911 Characters
Article ID : 294951
September 26, 2003
SYMPTOMS
When you import a text file, Microsoft Excel may truncate some of the text fields to 255 characters.
CAUSE
This behavior occurs when all of the following conditions are true:
€¢ You use the Text Import Wizard to import the file.
€¢ The field is longer than 911 characters.
€¢ You do not use step 3 of the Text Import Wizard to set the data type of the field to Text.
RESOLUTION
To work around this issue, make sure that you set the data type of long text fields to Text.
After being imported, the data may appear as number signs (###).
To work around this behavior, change the format of the affected columns to General.
STATUS
This problem was corrected in Excel 2002.
'-----------------------------------
Jim Cone
San Francisco, USA



"richtea"

wrote in message
...
every time i import a text file into excel, only the first 255 characters are
being imported. how can i solve this problem so that all of the info in each
field is displayed regardless of the number of characters?
p.s. i'm using excel 2000