Data Valaidation is not available as part of the protection on this spread
sheet. But I can still use that if I copy my cell contents to a new sheet.
It's also good to know for the future. Thanks MartinW.

"MartinW" wrote:

Hi lcg,

Also
You can use Data Validation to stop this from happening.
Select your input cells
Go to DataValidation
On the Allow dropdown choose Text Length
In the next dropdown select Less than or equal to
and in the Maximum Box type 100
And OK out

That will give you the default error alert
If you wish to change that click on the error alert Tab
before you OK out.

HTH
Martin


"lcg" wrote in message
...
I'll appreciate any help I can get. I'm using MS Office Professional 2003.
I'm working in a worksheet that is used to download into a database.
There
are rules defined for each type of data that is entered. The max number of
characters allowed in one particular cell is suppose to be 100. If you
need
additional space, you would use the cell below for the carryover. The cell
allows me to exceed 100 without error or warning. However, once the info
downloads to the database and is extracted out again later, the cell has
been
truncated to 100. Short of arrowing through all the data in the cell and
manually counting, is there a way to get the total count of characters
(including punctuation and spaces) in a cell for the times I know it could
be
close? This is someone else's worsheet that I'm completing and all of the
formating is protected. Thanks in advance.