One of the nice things about xl is that text in a cell will overlap
into the next cell if there's nothing there, rather than be "cut off".
Unfortunately in my spreadsheet this isn't working...

The spreadsheet in question is generated in code. The code first
builds a huge table of data from SQL, and pastes it into columns
starting at BA, which it then hides. The columns the user sees, A
through T currently, are then built by inserting formulas that copy
the data. To save recalc time I then copy and pastevalues any of the
columns that cannot change, which is about half of them. I use
formulas instead of copying and pasting them directly because there's
a small bit of logic that has to be applied to each row, and it SEEMS
that a formula is much faster than looping over them.

Anyway, the A column is sparsely populated text, some of which is
long. If there is text in that column, the formula means there is no
text in B. Yet the text in A is NOT overlapping the cell boundary into
B.