Hello -

My company uses an estimate form that has several worksheets, and in one of
them a description is carried over onto a proposal template sheet. I use
Excel 2003, and it appears to be limiting the number of character carried
over to 255. It all turns into pound signs.

I've tried directly cutting and pasting the content over instead (which I
hoped would bring me back up to the standard 1024 character limit instead of
255), but for some reason that isn't working either. It displays on the first
sheet nicely, and not at all on the second. I'm beginning to think I'm losing
my mind, but no one else at the company can fix it either. Is there some,
silly, basic formatting thing I'm missing?

Double check that the cell is formatted as "General" and then enter the data
or formula again. When I did it on my Excel 2003 machine it would take a 300
character value fine when formatted as "General" but showed up as ##### when
formatted as "Text". This worked for me both by typing the data in directly
in the cell and by entering a formula that referred to another cell
(=Sheet1!B13).

Hope this helps.

Bill Horton

"Wendy Murphy" wrote:

Hello -

My company uses an estimate form that has several worksheets, and in one of
them a description is carried over onto a proposal template sheet. I use
Excel 2003, and it appears to be limiting the number of character carried
over to 255. It all turns into pound signs.

I've tried directly cutting and pasting the content over instead (which I
hoped would bring me back up to the standard 1024 character limit instead of
255), but for some reason that isn't working either. It displays on the first
sheet nicely, and not at all on the second. I'm beginning to think I'm losing
my mind, but no one else at the company can fix it either. Is there some,
silly, basic formatting thing I'm missing?

That did it!! Bill, thank you so much. You just saved my sanity. I had tried
moving it to text, but for some reason not general.

Many thanks,

Wendy Murphy (and the rest of her frustrated sales team)

"William Horton" wrote:

Double check that the cell is formatted as "General" and then enter the data
or formula again. When I did it on my Excel 2003 machine it would take a 300
character value fine when formatted as "General" but showed up as ##### when
formatted as "Text". This worked for me both by typing the data in directly
in the cell and by entering a formula that referred to another cell
(=Sheet1!B13).

Hope this helps.

Bill Horton

"Wendy Murphy" wrote:

Hello -

My company uses an estimate form that has several worksheets, and in one of
them a description is carried over onto a proposal template sheet. I use
Excel 2003, and it appears to be limiting the number of character carried
over to 255. It all turns into pound signs.

I've tried directly cutting and pasting the content over instead (which I
hoped would bring me back up to the standard 1024 character limit instead of
255), but for some reason that isn't working either. It displays on the first
sheet nicely, and not at all on the second. I'm beginning to think I'm losing
my mind, but no one else at the company can fix it either. Is there some,
silly, basic formatting thing I'm missing?

Wendy

It's a bug. Excel will return the ### signs if cell is formatted to text and
char length is 255 to 1024.

Genral format fixes that as you have found.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On Wed, 10 Jan 2007 08:01:01 -0800, Wendy Murphy
wrote:

That did it!! Bill, thank you so much. You just saved my sanity. I had tried
moving it to text, but for some reason not general.

Many thanks,

Wendy Murphy (and the rest of her frustrated sales team)

"William Horton" wrote:

Double check that the cell is formatted as "General" and then enter the data
or formula again. When I did it on my Excel 2003 machine it would take a 300
character value fine when formatted as "General" but showed up as ##### when
formatted as "Text". This worked for me both by typing the data in directly
in the cell and by entering a formula that referred to another cell
(=Sheet1!B13).

Hope this helps.

Bill Horton

"Wendy Murphy" wrote:

Hello -

My company uses an estimate form that has several worksheets, and in one of
them a description is carried over onto a proposal template sheet. I use
Excel 2003, and it appears to be limiting the number of character carried
over to 255. It all turns into pound signs.

I've tried directly cutting and pasting the content over instead (which I
hoped would bring me back up to the standard 1024 character limit instead of
255), but for some reason that isn't working either. It displays on the first
sheet nicely, and not at all on the second. I'm beginning to think I'm losing
my mind, but no one else at the company can fix it either. Is there some,
silly, basic formatting thing I'm missing?