Q:

Increase size limit of data import from csv into Excel

I have a load of data in a csv file that I'm importing into Excel, most of it is fine, but one of my columns contains up to 1000 characters of data. Unfortunately, Excel has taken it upon itself to assume that's more data than I need and seems to be cutting it short (at 255 chars).
How can I increase this limit and retain all my data?

A:

There is a weird bug in Excel. I'll explain here how to avoid (not fix, just avoid) it, and maybe it will fixed soon by MS Office programmers. Maybe it even WAS fixed in Excel 2013, I did not open it yet.
So, this is the problem.
The maximum length of the text cell is 32767, and it's OK.
The maximum length of the number cell is 255, and it's OK.
But if you have a cell that calls to number parser, fails and then calls to text parser, here will be the big mess.
For example:
...,"This is a cell with 30,000 characters........",...

will work.
But if you'll put a little minus at the start, as in
...,"-This is a cell with 30,000 characters........",...

you'll see only 255 first text characters, because EXCEL thinks it's a negative number.
Hope it helps.

A:

Firstly, Thank you all for your help in trying to solve this. It turns out excel can quite happily accommodate more than 255 chars to a cell (presumable up to 32,767 as previously mentioned if you've got the ram for it.
So why didn't is work?
The short answer is I'm not sure. The first time I brought the data into excel I exported as a csv then opened in excel. This cut the columns short (at 255). (the csv file contained all the data when viewed through notepad but not when saved again through excel).
The column in question did contain some semicolons, but this didnt correspond to the cut off point (always 255) and I wasnt using ; as a delimiter.
My solution wast to do an export as an xls file. This has since been saved successfully as a csv file with the full data.
Hope this helps someone even though I'm still not sure exactly what the issue was here.

