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]

You can do all of this in Word these days

You can? How do you sort by category, assuming you've got a column stating what category the entry comes into - in this case, either English, Spanish or Caribbean?

Oh, and whilst you're here (demanding? Moi?) can you tell me how to turn smart quotes off in Word? I'm using Win XP Home edition and *cannot* remember how to turn the damn things off.

I'm fine, thanks. A bit busy workwise as it looks like we may be going to trial in a couple of weeks, contrary to everyone's expectation. As a result we're not ready so there's lots of work that will need to be done. Mind you, when the day comes for the jury to be empanelled I'm betting the date will end up being put back. Most frustrating.

You?

[temaris.livejournal.com]

Smartquotes: Tools / Autocorrect Options

Untick it in 'Autoformat as you type' and in 'Autoformat'.

And sort by selecting the table and from the menu pick Table / Sort

It insists on using headers, and gets confused by merged cells sometimes, but should work.

*Word* I know. *g*

[mandragora1.livejournal.com]

Muchos gracias. Belatedly.

[smaragdgrun.livejournal.com]

You can sort by each column, and even by one column then another,(so category, and then last name, for example). And you can specify a header row/rows. Go to Table => Sort.

And then definitely go to Tools => Autocorrect options. And turn everything off! Smartquotes are the first to go!

Doing okay -- busy, but hoping it will slow down in a couple of weeks. The spring weather has been fabulous! ;>