Text showing up as a bunch of # signs

[m55113]

Hello,

I am trying to create a table of numbers for an economics journal article, i.e. something like

Table 1: Table of Numbers
Row 1 2.3 3.4
Row 2 3.4 4.5
Notes: This is a table of numbers which may be important for many
different things. I received this table of numbers from Jones et al. (2007).

For the "Notes" entry beneath the table, I merge together several different cells, and then type the text in. The problem is that oftentimes the text in "Notes" will simply show up as a bunch of number signs (#) in Excel. I am currently using Excel for Mac 2008, but the problem also popped up previously on my previous PC computer (I just swithced over to Mac about 3 weeks ago) on which I ran either Excel 2003 or Excel for XP (I can't remember which one offhand).

I've tried a number of different things including deleting the cell and repasting the Notes text from a Word file into a new cell; unmerging the cells and pasting in; and typing in the text again by hand. Only the last option, typing in again by hand seems sometimes to do any good. It seems that if too much text is entered at once, then Excel is likely to display the text as a bunch of number signs.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I might be able to avoid this problem and type in text beneath the table?

Thanks a lot.

 

[Blade Hunter]

You can put a ' before anything to stop it trying to treat it as a number but I would strongly recommend the use of Word for your Word Processing needs, Excel is really not designed for this.

 

[Sandeep Warrier]

I'm guessing this is due to Excel's limit on the no. of characters to be displayed in a cell (256 characters).

I've faced this problem many times and it's usually resolved when I format the cell to General or Text. I'm not sure whether this would work in Excel for Mac.
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