2 easy questions for the gurus (formula&character limit related)

[hemjeseti]

hey there great guru's of Excel - i really need your help. I'll get right to it.

FIRST PROB: i have a price column, and i need to reduce the entire column by 15% - I'm fine with taking the price column and pasting it into a new document, reducing, and pasting back into original document. i just can't find info on how to adjust a single column once - everyone wants to create a new column to show the "new price" etc. And i'm not a big excel person so perhaps i'm over complicating this.

SECOND: I have a field called Full Description - it holds all the relative data about a product. I uploaded the date and noticed that the data cuts off. After investigating i learned, it's a text field, and it needs to be a memo field to accept more that 255 characters.

how does one do this?

I look forward to hearing from you guys and thank you in advance for all your help, guidance and wisdom. you guys are awesome!

 

[VoG]

For the first one: type 0.85 into an empty cell and copy it. Select your column of number, Edit > Paste Special, tick Multiply then click OK.

 

[rallcorn]

#1. As long as you do not need to retain the original amts.
Type .85 in a blank cell & Ctrl+C to copy it, then highlight/select the column or cells that you wished to be reduced by 15% and WHILE highlighted/selected Paste Special & select "multiply" and "OK"

 

[hemjeseti]

hey thanks for the quick response. I try what'cha said, and it works, buuuuuuuuuut, my prices change to four digit decimal?? instead of 550.15 it's 550.1595

Did i do something wrong? or is there more to my edit?

i even copied the pricing to a notepad, and created a new excel book, repasted to ensure that there were not formulas in the price column and it did the same thing. any ideas?

 

[VoG]

You can format the cells to display the number of decimals that you require.

 

[hemjeseti]

select column, right click, format - got it. saw in there it said percentage also - is that to say you can set % there as well? or is that to convert the column to a percent?

thank you guys again for your quick help on the first problem.

Any ideas on the second problem?

 

[VoG]

A cell should display 1,024 characters http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifications-and-limits-HP005199291.aspx

 

[hemjeseti]

won't it accept up to 25K of characters if a memo field and not a text field? how do i change it to a memo field, i'll check the link and repost.

 

[hemjeseti]

okay - i found this:

In the versions of Microsoft Excel listed at the beginning of this article, a cell can contain up to 32,767 characters. However, if a cell contains more than 1,024 characters, the following rules apply:

Characters after approximately the 1,024th character do not appear in the cell; however, they appear in the formula bar when you edit or select the cell.

Although characters after approximately the 1,024th character do not appear, you can detect and manipulate them with worksheet functions (for example, the RIGHT and MID functions) and macro commands (for example the Characters property).

If you copy a cell that contains more than 1,024 characters, and then paste them in another cell, all of the characters are pasted into the new cell. However, characters after approximately the 1,024th character do not appear in the destination cell.

Characters in a cell after approximately the 1,024th character are not printed and may not appear in print preview.

Note You may be able to see more than 1,024 characters by increasing the row height and column width of the worksheet, or by modifying the display settings of the system.

Now, my question is, how do i change this? I saw it said, "change format to general and you should be okay" but it looked as if that was what it was set to already........ this is frustrating - no one offers a clear answer out there - they all assume you know what a "formatted cell" is.

 

[BenMiller]

Right-click on the cell and choose "format cell". Select General (it's the first option)