Row height won’t expand for imported text (Excel 2003)

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I have a spreadsheet, xls format, created in OpenOffice. It has multiple lines of merged cells set to text format and line wrap. In OOo it looks fine, the rows are autoexpanded to show all the text. Typically the height of 3 or 4 lines of text.

When opened in Excel 2003, all the rows were a single line height. I figured, no problem, I will just click the rows and they will expand. Nope.

I have checked the format of the rows. They all show (in Excel) as being Text and Line Wrapping. I have tried Format, Row, Autoheight with no success. As a matter of fact, when I manually expand a row so that all the text shows and then trigger Autoheight, it jumps back to single line height.

I figured there must be some embedded codes which were fouling it up so I tried saving out to different older formats and reloading. Nothing fixed it. Going out to CSV would lose all formatting, which I would like to avoid.

Any ideas?

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Could you post a small sample workbook (with sensitive data removed or replaced by dummy data)?

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Interesting. The attached file has several rows as illustration. Only one of the rows is acting up as previously described. Others seem OK. Look at row 6. Note that you cannot see the text unless you change the cell format from text to general (forgot to mention that previously). After format change you can see first line but row will not autoexpand to show the rest of it.

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The problem cell is over 255 characters in length. “Text” formatting only works correctly with values of less than 256 characters.

Excel never autofits the row height or column width of merged cells. See post 270923 for code that will perform the autofit.

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Hi Paul,
This does not have anything to do with the fact your workbook was created in OOO; it is simply down to the fact that your cells are merged. Excel does not seem to like trying to autofit merged cells and there are no nice ways around this that I know of. (You can add an unmerged column with a link to your merged cell and autofit on that but that is not usually a good solution from a presentation point of view!)

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Thanks to Hans, I have an understanding of the problem and a possible macro based solution. Interesting discovering the limitations and quirks of various programs.

As always, the Lounge and the people who frequent it are great resources.

Many thanks.

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