We are using Outlook 2002 and 2003 to create tasks for many different people.
Each person adds notes to their tasks. To create a weekly report, we export
the tasks from each person into 1 CSV file per person, and then import each
CSV file into a single file in Excel 2003 ver (11.8117.8122) SP2.

When we have a large amount of notes for a task, the import into Excel
overflows the "Notes" cell/column, and the overflow text spews into other
cells like "Subject", "Start Date", etc. This one large task might take up 20
or 30 rows in Excel instead of 1. This make a horrible looking report!

We TRIED to export from Outlook directly into Excel, but that process only
captures about 200-300 characters of the notes in the task, so it is quite
worthless. That was why we went the CSV file route.

Questions a

1) Excel help indicates "Length of cell contents (text)" as: "32,767
characters. Only 1,024 display in a cell; all 32,767 display in the formula
bar".
Why would a task that has 31283 characters (with spaces) overflow the cell,
if the limit is 32767? One task that has 30038 characters was handled
properly upon import.

2) Is there a way to force Excel to truncate the import so the overflow does
not occur?

3) What is the BEST way to handle large text task imports that have notes
greater than the limit?

My test cases were several tasks created with the following numbers and
letters to get the desired character count, and then saved to different tasks
with different word counts:

---
test3

1234567890 1234567890 1234567890 1234567890 1234567890 1234567890
abcdefg hijklmn opqrstuvwxyz abcdefg hijklmn opqrstuvwxyz abcdefg hijklmn
opqrstuvwxyz