Help!

[mandragora]

Er, of a technical nature, that is.

Does anyone out there have any expertise in Excel? At work we've been working on a chronology of a long-running court case. The chronology is in Excel format but there is a problem in that the text in some of the cells won't wrap properly. Part of the text is obscured on the screen and also when the document is printed out. The only way to read all of the text is by highlighting the cell in question and calling up all of the text.

We've tried checking the option to wrap text, but that option was ticked in any event before the chronology was started and it makes no difference fiddling about with it. We tried altering the size of the column which contains the cells where the text is obscured and making it bigger, but some of the text was still obscured no matter how big it was, which was within the constraints of being able to read it on the screen. We tried merging cells (although I don't think that we did it very successfully, as we weren't able to get rid of the lines between them). But in any event the text in the merged cells was still obscured.

I'm wondering whether the cells have a limit as to how much text they will contain, given that Excel was designed for figures and not text. The cells where we're having difficulty contain over 200 words, with about 12 lines or more.

Does anyone have any suggestions how to fix the problem, assuming it's fixable at all, that is?

Failing that, can anyone suggest an easy way of inputting the data into a table in Word format, short of copying and pasting individual cells one by one?

Any suggestions gratefully accepted.

Comments

[mandragora1.livejournal.com]

Many thanks for the info, which is fascinating and I shall memorise for future reference. In fact as Carenejeans helpfully pointed out I just needed to highlight the text and paste into Word. Which I really should have realised.

I don't think it's necessary to have this particular chronology in Excel format (unlike one I've done that's 650 pages long when printed out, and keeping it in Excel means we can easily sort the data into various categories) so I think I'll just convert it into Word and have done.

I wish many times I didn't have to do MS either. But, it's the default system for lawyers so I'm stuck with it.

[filenotch.livejournal.com]

About pasting: It's neater if you use the database import trick, because Word will obey the margins as it creates the table. Pasting from copied Excel cells, iirc, can give you a table that runs sideways off the page.

[mandragora1.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, we discovered that this morning. So, I made the paralegal go back and make the Excel cell narrower... It worked for me (seeing as I didn't have to do anything, but in my defence I was busy doing something else).