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Excel - How to Display Long Text in Excel | Solving the Text Display Problem - Episode 631

2,322 views · Published 26 March 2009 · 3:44 · Indexed 8 November 2026

Channel: MrExcel.com · 2009 · Education

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Microsoft Excel Tutorial:  How to Display Long Text in Excel | Solving the Text Display Problem.

Welcome back to the MrExcel podcast! In today's episode, we have an interesting problem that was brought to our attention by a viewer who called in. They were dealing with a database where one column had really long text, and they were having trouble displaying all of it in Excel. I'll walk you through the solution I came up with, but I'm sure there are other ways to tackle this issue.

The first step was to use the LEN function to see just how many characters we were dealing with. It turned out to be 1643, which is well within Excel's limit of 4096 characters. However, when we looked at the cell, we noticed that not all of the text was being displayed. Even when we tried adjusting the row height, the text would still get cut off at the same spot. We also tried changing the vertical alignment, but that didn't solve the problem either.

After some trial and error, I came up with a solution that may not be the most elegant, but it gets the job done. I copied all of the text from the cell and pasted it into a text box, making sure to hold down the Alt key to match the size of the cell. Then, I adjusted the font and properties of the text box to make it blend in with the cell. This way, we were able to display all of the text without it getting cut off.

It's strange that Excel has a limit of 4096 characters but can't display them all in a cell. But until a better solution comes along, using a text box seems to be the way to go. Just make sure to set the text box to move and size with cells, so it stays in place when you sort the data. And if you have a better solution, please let me know in the comments below. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel!

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Excel can allegedly handle 4096 characters in a cell, but in todays podcast nothing past character 1130 is displaying in the cell. In Episode 631, a convoluted solution with a textbox solves the problem, but there must be a better way.

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Table of Contents:
(00:00) Introduction to the problem
(00:20) Using the LEN function to determine the length of the text
(00:43) Excel's limit of 4096 characters
(01:30) Attempting to fix the issue with formatting
(01:40) Alternative solution using a text box
(02:41) Formatting the text box to appear as a cell
(03:14) Deleting the original cell and using the text box instead
(03:24) Clicking Like really helps the algorithm


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