Excel cell character limit
Is the cell character limit (32,767) in Excel hard coded or can it be modified to allow more than 32,767 characters? I have not found any source which suggests it can be modified, but I have found nothing which explicitly says it is hard coded and CANNOT be modified.
2 Answers
You can't expand the total character count. From Microsoft:
Total number of characters that a cell can contain: 32,767 characters
That being said, here are a few related questions on SO:
- A new idea on how to beat the 32,767 text limit in Excel
- Get maximum number of characters that a cell can contain
- Excel 2007: remove text limitations from cell
You are probably reading long data from some source into Excel, which has this hard built-in limitation of 32,767, which applies to both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
This isn't the best usage of Excel, since it is not made to be used as database. This is rather the function of Access or other databases. Longer data than the maximum should continue to be kept in external storage, outside of Excel.
There are some unsatisfactory workarounds :
You could, for instance, insert the lengthy text selections into text boxes rather than into cells. The text boxes don't have the same limit, and you can format the contents in any way desired, but using them this way is quite awkward.
Another approach is to actually add the long information to a Word document, copy it, and then paste it into Excel (using Paste Special) as a Word object, but again, using them this way is quite awkward.
To conclude, there are workarounds, but they are pretty hard to use.
