I've never seen it in the help file.

And the guess that makes the most sense to me came from Tom Ogilvy. At one
time, the largest number of characters you could put in a cell was 255 (or
256???). When that was increased, someone missed updating somewhere that would
avoid the trouble.

And the 1024 number could be a result of the maximum length of a formula (in
R1C1 reference style).



Bob wrote:

Dave,
Thanks for the info! Can you tell me where this info is documented in
Excel's Help file? I'm trying to figure out what is significant about a
string being greater than 255 characters, but less than 1024 (from a
formatting perspective)?
Thanks again,
Bob

"Dave Peterson" wrote:

The problem (###'s) occur when the cell is formatted as text and the length of
the string in that cell is between 255 and 1024 characters.

Anything outside those will show ok.



Bob wrote:

1) Copy the following paragraph to cells A1 and A2 (be sure to remove the
line breaks that this web site adds):

Placing this project in yellow as Company ABC has NOT provided as yet, the
T&C1 to the MOM. Both have been overdue since mid-June. Escalations within
Company ABC and from Company XYZ leadership has not changed the status.
Meanwhile, Company ABC PM is reporting that INSTAR test support is an issue.
Sahni has escalated numerous times on both issues.

2) Format A1 with the General format; format A2 with the Text format.
Notice that A1 looks normal, but A2 shows €œ###########################€�

3) Now copy the following paragraph to cells A3 and A4 (again be sure to
remove the line breaks that this web site adds):

10/31 [tm0622] - Request for swBRD to be baselined via e-mail, because it is
late. 10/23 - swBRD - not baselined, T&C (1) to be delivered 7 days from
baselining.

4) Format A3 with the General format; format A4 with the Text format.
Notice that A1 and A2 both look normal!

Can anyone tell me what is going on here? Any help in solving this mystery
would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Bob

--

Dave Peterson


--

Dave Peterson