I saw this question in Twitter this week:
Anyone know a way to get an Excel cell to take over 255 characters w/o converting to pound signs ###? Wreaking havoc on something I'm trying
Here's an example – in the following screenshot, cells B2 and B3 contain the same long string of characters.
In column A, you can see the identical character counts for the adjacent cells in column B. In cell B3 the long text simply overflows into the next column, but in cell B2 only the pound signs are visible.
Fix the Problem
Pound signs also show up if a number is too long to display in a cell, and widening the column would fix the problem. However, in this case the cells contain text, not numbers. Widening the column won't help.
In this example, cell B2 is formatted as Text, and you can fix the problem by formatting the cell as General.
To change the format:
- Select cell B2, and on the Ribbon, click the Home tab
- In the Number group, click the dropdown arrow for Number format
- Click on General. (Note: If you look down the list of formats you'll see that Accounting and Text show pound signs, instead of the sample text.)