Text cell is displayed with hash characters

Question

In Excel 2007, I see that the content of some cells are displayed as hash characters (###). These cells are formatted as text and their contents are displayed like this if the number of characters are more than 255.

Is there any way to fix this?

Answer 1

Cells formatted as text can only handle 256 characters. Anything more and they will be displayed with hash characters (###).

To get around this limitation, you can change the formatting of the cell to General. This format has a much larger character limit.

Answer 2

This is excels way of telling you that the field does not fit in the cell.

If you make the cell-width "automatic," the hashes will dissappear.

This generally happens when you give a cell a specific format and Excel feels it doesn't fit in view.

EDIT: To make your cells auto-width:

Double-click on the right edge of the column header. That is, at the top, you have columns A,B,C... Say you want to expand the values in column E. You have to double-click on the edge between columns E and F.

This will expand the cell size. Also, if you have text in the cell, you can always right-click on the cell, click on Format Cells, and then put a check next to Wrap-text.

Answer 3

Try this. While opening the Excel file, select the text option. Here, one important thing is how you are writing the content to the Excel file. If you do it manually then do not write something which Excel does not allow. But if you want to write in your code then use POI/JExcel.