You get all those characters when the "sending" workbook/worksheet is open.

But close that worksheet, recalculate, it gets truncated to 255 (IIRC)
characters.

==
To the Original Poster--I have no idea why the excel developers did it that way.

Gord Dibben wrote:

I don't find this to be the case.

I can get around 1000 characters to show in the cell.

Excel's specs state that 32,767 chars can be entered but only 1024 will show
or can be printed.

How many chars in your source cell?

Gord Dibben Excel MVP

On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 11:25:02 -0800, "Excel help needed" <Excel help
wrote:

I have a linked sheet in excel and the contents of the source sheet. When
this is displayed in the linked sheet, only the first 256 characters are
shown. Can any one help

--

Dave Peterson