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#1
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Text in Text-formatted cells changes to ### after the 255th charac
Many times in the past when I would type plain text into cells of an Excel
spreadhseet, I noticed that at point, the contents of a cell would turn into sharp signs (i.e. ####################). I did not know what triggered this, but I did notice that if I change the cell type from Text to General, the cell's text would come back to normal. Today I had this happened again, and I was determined to find out what caused it. As it turns out, if you have a Text-formatted type cell and you type more than 255 characters in it, all the cell's contents will turn into sharp signs. In order to revert to the text you must either change the cell's format to General or truncate the text manually to a maximum of 255 characters. The problem with formatting cells as General in a text-only spreadsheet is that you cannot use characters that make Excel think you are typing a formula; that is, you cannot use hyphens or "keywords" such as "not", etc. This is why I normally format all cells as Text when I know I will only type text in a certain spreadsheet. Has anyone else noticed this, and is there a solution to have more than 255 characters in a cell without having to change its type to General? Thanks for any help. |
#2
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Text in Text-formatted cells changes to ### after the 255th charac
It is a bug.
AFAIK, the only way to revert back to text, without changing the format to General, is to have the character count *exceed 1024*. YES ! ... the text returns after 1024 characters, so the actual bug is *between* 256 and 1024 characters *only*. Would you want to try inserting spaces in appropriate places to attain that 1024 character count? -- HTH, RD --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please keep all correspondence within the NewsGroup, so all may benefit ! --------------------------------------------------------------------------- "wildetudor" wrote in message ... Many times in the past when I would type plain text into cells of an Excel spreadhseet, I noticed that at point, the contents of a cell would turn into sharp signs (i.e. ####################). I did not know what triggered this, but I did notice that if I change the cell type from Text to General, the cell's text would come back to normal. Today I had this happened again, and I was determined to find out what caused it. As it turns out, if you have a Text-formatted type cell and you type more than 255 characters in it, all the cell's contents will turn into sharp signs. In order to revert to the text you must either change the cell's format to General or truncate the text manually to a maximum of 255 characters. The problem with formatting cells as General in a text-only spreadsheet is that you cannot use characters that make Excel think you are typing a formula; that is, you cannot use hyphens or "keywords" such as "not", etc. This is why I normally format all cells as Text when I know I will only type text in a certain spreadsheet. Has anyone else noticed this, and is there a solution to have more than 255 characters in a cell without having to change its type to General? Thanks for any help. |
#3
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Text in Text-formatted cells changes to ### after the 255th charac
No way to get around formatting to General to avoid the ############## if
string is between 255 and 1024 characters. If you are not preceding the text strings with an = sign I don't know why a - sign or "not" would make Excel think you are typing a formula. Unless you have Lotus Transition settings enabled..............that would throw a #NAME? error if you typed "-qwerty" Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP On Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:14:02 -0700, wildetudor wrote: Many times in the past when I would type plain text into cells of an Excel spreadhseet, I noticed that at point, the contents of a cell would turn into sharp signs (i.e. ####################). I did not know what triggered this, but I did notice that if I change the cell type from Text to General, the cell's text would come back to normal. Today I had this happened again, and I was determined to find out what caused it. As it turns out, if you have a Text-formatted type cell and you type more than 255 characters in it, all the cell's contents will turn into sharp signs. In order to revert to the text you must either change the cell's format to General or truncate the text manually to a maximum of 255 characters. The problem with formatting cells as General in a text-only spreadsheet is that you cannot use characters that make Excel think you are typing a formula; that is, you cannot use hyphens or "keywords" such as "not", etc. This is why I normally format all cells as Text when I know I will only type text in a certain spreadsheet. Has anyone else noticed this, and is there a solution to have more than 255 characters in a cell without having to change its type to General? Thanks for any help. |
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