Wrapping text problem (Office 2003 SP2 )

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Hi there,

I have a user that is trying to use Excel as a data source for a fairly large mail merge exercise. Some of the text entries within cells are fairly long, and although she has set the cells to wrap text, where there is a lot of text the top section of the cell wraps and the last few lines don’t, they just cut off. They don’t even appear to the right of the cell if it is blank as you would expect were wrapping not selected.

All the text is still there, you can see it in the formula bar and when you perform the mail merge all the text is brought over, however she needs to print out the spreadsheet and therefore is missing some text from the larger cells. Is there a limit to the amount of text that will sit within a cell or anything that could impact on cell wrapping? Just in case this makes no sense to anyone I have attached a sample sheet where I have been able to replicate the problem.

Thanks in advance for any help you may provide
Alba

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Excel is not a word processor, it is not very good at wrapping text in cells. If your user really needs to have large amounts of text in a cell, it would be better to us a table in a Word document as data source for the mail merge.

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Normally I would agree that the user should be using Word, however the mail merge that they are trying to achieve is so large that I cannot get it onto a Word document. Even when making the page size as large as possible – I can only see about half of the width of the table they are using as the source.

Another issue that is creeping in is that when performing the mail merge some of the contents of the cells fail to appear properly – the text is being cut off at between 260-265 characters – only on some cells, other cells are much longer and the entire text is appearing correctly within the merge.

I have tried copying the entire sheet to a new workbook, format painting the problem cells from the cells that merge correctly, changing the cell format between general and text, reducing the font size..can anyone else think of any reason why this would happen or suggest any way round it??

Thanks

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I don’t know of a way round this in Excel. Is there any chance that you can use an Access database as data source? A memo field in Access can hold a very large amount of text, and Access has no problems displaying memo fields.

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Excellent idea Hans – I’ll give that a go!

Alba

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Worked like a charm Hans – tho I had to do it for her as she doesn’t have Access!!

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