With MS Excel 97 the number of characters that a cell can contain has been raised to above 30,000 characters. While this is a very welcome move on part of Big Brother Microsoft, they seem to have overlooked one important point regarding formatting.
Usually (with 'wrap text' on), row heights adjust to the height required by the contents of the cell containing the max. text. I discovered that there's a limit of 1024 chars on this. If your text is longer, it doesn't wrap around and the row height is just enough to accommodate the 1024 char limit. The full text is there, however.
I'm aware that there's a 409-point limit to row-height. If u put the col width to say 70(col.width units - not points - 1 col. width unit is eq. to a little over 6 points for the Arial 10 default font), 2000 chars will be under 30 lines high i.e. 30*12.75<409 points -but u'll see that auto row height stops short of this. Even forcibly increasing row height has no effect on the abrupt wrap interrupt at 1024 char limit.
I'm using this for generating Bills of Quantities - some of the text is long.
PS I've tried using text boxes - they do wrap correctly for longer text length, but it is inconvenient to automate setting the height correctly for a given col. width. I'll try something like Access only if I fail to get a solution in Excel - because of other Excel-based data links.
We often do BOQs in Excel and the whole formatting thing is a real nuisance. We generally work around it with various fixes. For the problem you mention above we just split the text into several cells for long descriptions. I know it's not ideal but it doesn't affect anything else.
The biggest problem I see with Excel is the fact that you never know how it will look when it prints out. Even the print preview is not WYSIWYG. Sometimes you'll find text has wrapped on the screen but not on the printed version.
Wrap-text limit in Excel '97