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Excel 2000 won't word-wrap whole entry

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by wordworker

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This one is driving me crazy and I can't find any MS documentation about it. I have long text entries in a spreadsheet. I format the cells with Alignment set to Wrap. For 98% of my cells, that works just fine. Then for no apparent reason, I put in a particularly long entry, and after 30-40 lines of wrapping correctly, the wrapping stops. The lines run off the edge of the cell (invisible because adjacent cells contain entries). Is there a maximum # of characters that Excel can "handle"? Is this a known bugaboo in Excel 2000? Help! I'm going to have to paste the whole thing into Word to get the printout I need...

6 replies

by sgt_shultz

this sounds vaguely familiar but i can find it yet. if you took a problem cell and did format/row/autofit, would that fix it?
if you copied a problem cell and pasted it into a cell surrounded by *empty* cells, would that fix it? (just for a test). if it does, does repasting it back into the problem cell help? that is the one that sounds familiar and i seem to remember it was a bug.

by wordworker

Poster rated this answer.
It is only at SP1 but I can't update this client's machine myself. I tried your tests but, like the others I'd tried, they didn't change anything.

by dklippert

The maximum in one cell is 32,767 characters. However only 1,024 display in a cell; all 32,767 display in the formula bar.
Max Column width 255 characters
Max Row height 409 points

Try putting the text in a Text box. (use the Drawing toolbar).
You can control the text flow and formatting more easily than you can in a cell.

BTW the key word in the Help file is: specification

by wordworker

Poster rated this answer.
I can't do a text box because it's a series of 200 rows of varying-length text entries. However, you hit the nail on the head by churning up the limit of 1024 display in a cell. I'm going to use =MID(cell,1,1024) and MID(cell,1025,999) to bust the long ones up into two pieces. While I have you, DKlippert remember that Word doc that was printing the Page Break graphics? Got the faxes and sure enough it was printing the page breaks just like they were visible text on the page. Final clue: It was only happening in one document that had gone from Word-FrontPage-somethingelse-back-to-Word. We just recreated the doc. but never completely figured out why it printed.

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