I believe you, and yes this was the work around
we used, setting it back to General. My question
to Microsoft then is why does their help file say:

Column width 255 characters
Length of cell contents (text) 32,767 characters.
Only 1,024 display in a cell; all 32,767 display in
the formula bar.

Implying that the cell can be formatted as text
and display 1024 when this isn't the case?

It could be read as, "The length of cell contents, when text, is 32,767
characters. [...]" This does not imply that the cell is formatted as
Text, only that text entries can be up to that length and that only the
first 1,024 characters will be displayed. After all, one can enter
text in a cell with a Number format.

I agree, though, that a cell formatted as Text really should be able to
display 1,024 characters of text just as well as a General-formatted
cell. I wonder if fixing it would break something else in the Excel
code.