On 2002-04-12 01:00, Ian Mac wrote:
My mistake on th limits thing, according to the help files the following is the limits that Excel place upon th user,
Column width 0 (zero) to 255 characters
Row height 0 to 409 points
Maximum length of cell contents (text) 32,000 characters
Maximum length of formula contents 1,024 characters
Maximum number of sheets in a workbook Limited by available memory (default number of sheets is 3; the maximum number of sheets in a default workbook is 255)
Ian,
that was me wasn't it ?
it was *my* understanding of the formula, not a gospel version of the ultimate truth
It's good to see it being questioned though. Reading through, it looks like you're right, in theory it should be extended to 32,000 "z"s......
As Mark pointed out though in his original post, this doesn't help the efficiency of the formula : it may be better to incorporate an actual max text string value of the range first.
HOwever :
text string "asdfghj", sorted alphabetically, is before "zzz"
so in a list, zzz will be last (giving us the bottom limit of the range)
ergo, a string of 255 "z"s would only ever be replaced at the bottom of a list by a string of more than 255 characters, the first 255 of which must be "z"s.
Since the max column width is static at 255 charcaters, both would appear in a drop down data validation list as 255 "z"s, with the remainder of each being chopped off, visually.
So it would be pointless having them as the user would not be able to differentiate between the two.
All of this *assumed*, the user would only ever have a list that had 255 charcters maximum, thus the formula is applicable, even if the explanation is a bit misleading !
As you can tell, I'm no expert at all, still learning
cheers Ian
Chris
This message was edited by Chris Davison on 2002-04-13 05:49