How can I properly format this text in Excel for Mac?

February 5, 2009 9:49 PM

Some cells in excel x for mac (release 1), which are formatted for text, with "wrap text" selected, look like this, and it's driving me crazy. If I double click on that cell, I can read the text that is written in there. But otherwise, it just shows up as "###########." Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Google hasn't helped me out.
posted by visual mechanic to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Quick guess: Do you have more than 1024 characters in the cell? You can hold more than that, but Excel will never display text if there's more than 1024.
posted by pompomtom at 9:52 PM on February 5, 2009

Try making the column wider, or the cell taller.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:54 PM on February 5, 2009

Response by poster: One of them is only 272 characters, and no matter how wide or tall I make the cell the ###### persists.
posted by visual mechanic at 9:57 PM on February 5, 2009

Did you cut and paste the text from somewhere? If so, there may be weird embedded formatting that came with it that Excel can't deal with. Try pasting the text in a plain text editor (in Windows, I would use Notepad), and then cutting and pasting from that back into Excel. I've solved many Excel issues that way.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 10:27 PM on February 5, 2009

In my experience, the hash marks show up when Excel can't display the text because there isn't enough room in the cell to do so. Normally, it can be solved by increasing the column width/row height. Looking at the picture, my hunch would be that you have set the row height and column width to a specific value. Try changing that to automatic, see how that goes.

Have you tested changing the formatting to something else rather than text? Change it to "general" and see if that makes any difference.
posted by gemmy at 10:31 PM on February 5, 2009

Best answer: Change the format of the cell from "text" to "general".

I don't know why that matters. Drives me crazy sometimes too.
posted by rokusan at 10:41 PM on February 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you rokusan!! I was going insane.

Thanks everyone for the other tips, too. Those are all the things I had tried (and I hadn't copied and pasted, either, but you're right that can really result in some nasty problems.) But the Text versus General setting was the magic bullet I was looking for.
posted by visual mechanic at 1:13 AM on February 6, 2009

I was just coming to AskMe to post this exact same question, but luckily you guys have already solved it. I love MetaFilter!
posted by DiscourseMarker at 1:54 PM on February 7, 2009