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Excel - Excel Tutorial: The Problem with Edit Fill Justify - Text Truncation Warning! - Episode 567

857 views · Published 6 July 2009 · 3:07 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: MrExcel.com · 2009 · Education

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Microsoft Excel Tutorial:  The Problem with Edit Fill Justify - Text Truncation Warning!

Welcome back to the MrExcel netcast! In my books, I often discuss a useful trick called Edit Fill Justify. This feature allows you to word wrap text in order to make it fit into a designated area. However, there is a major issue with using Edit Fill Justify that I want to bring to your attention.

The problem arises when any of your sentences are longer than 255 characters. To demonstrate this, I have created six sentences that are about 50 characters each and used the CONCATENATE function to combine them into one long sentence. When I try to use Edit Fill Justify, Excel silently truncates all of the characters after 255, without giving any warning. This means that the original sentence, which was 300 characters long, is now cut off and missing important information.

This issue is due to the fact that Edit Fill Justify was created back when cells could only hold 255 characters. Even though Excel has since expanded to allow 4096 characters in a cell, this feature was never updated. So, if you are a fan of using Edit Fill Justify, be aware that it may not work as expected and could result in important information being lost.

One workaround for this problem is to copy the text and paste it into Microsoft Word. From there, you can paste it back into Excel as a text box and the text will wrap properly. However, this is a long and convoluted process. The main point of this netcast is to make you aware of the issue with Edit Fill Justify and to remind you to always double check your text after using this feature.

Thank you to Bill for bringing this issue to our attention. If you have any questions or suggestions for future netcasts, please feel free to email us at [email protected]. We appreciate your support and hope to see you again for our next netcast from MrExcel.

Buy Bill Jelen's latest Excel book: https://www.mrexcel.com/products/latest/

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Table of Contents:
(00:00) Introduction
(00:18) Edit Fill Justify Trick
(00:28) Using Edit Fill Justify
(00:44) Problem with Edit Fill Justify
(01:02) Workaround for Long Sentences
(01:36) Excel's Limitation with Edit Fill Justify
(02:26) Alternative Solution
(02:41) Clicking Like really helps the algorithm

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Are you a fan of Edit  Fill  Justify? If so, watch out if you try to justify particularly long text  anything over 255 characters in a cell. Excel fails miserably, and you lost part of your text, without any warning from Excel. Episode 567 shows you the details.

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