dealing with cell text limits

I'm helping a non-computer-savvy friend with an Excel spreadsheet that is
used to manage a theater production. One page of this sheet is used for
entering notes on the evening's show, e.g., problems with costumes, changes
for lighting, etc.

Sometimes these comments are empty or just a few words. Sometimes they are
mini-essays, up to 30 or 40 lines of text. The cells containing the text
need to resize appropriately, and need to (of course) display all the text
they contain.

She is running into big problems with Excel's behavior on cells that contain
large amounts of text. As we all know, autosizing does not work with merged
cells, which these are; okay, there are macro solutions. But also, autowrap
does not work beyond a certain number of characters, and I have not found
any solutions for that.

It seems we're simply trying to make Excel do something it's not meant to
do. So, what is the right answer? Would it work to try to insert some sort
of COM control into these cells, rather than using Excel to manage the text?
Could we still get the auto-sizing to work?

If so, what would the appropriate control be, and where might I go to find
examples of how to code this?

Maybe you should consider using textboxes instead of cells to contain such
large chunks of text; these are resizable.

"Walter Harley" wrote:

> I'm helping a non-computer-savvy friend with an Excel spreadsheet that is
> used to manage a theater production. One page of this sheet is used for
> entering notes on the evening's show, e.g., problems with costumes, changes
> for lighting, etc.
>
> Sometimes these comments are empty or just a few words. Sometimes they are
> mini-essays, up to 30 or 40 lines of text. The cells containing the text
> need to resize appropriately, and need to (of course) display all the text
> they contain.
>
> She is running into big problems with Excel's behavior on cells that contain
> large amounts of text. As we all know, autosizing does not work with merged
> cells, which these are; okay, there are macro solutions. But also, autowrap
> does not work beyond a certain number of characters, and I have not found
> any solutions for that.
>
> It seems we're simply trying to make Excel do something it's not meant to
> do. So, what is the right answer? Would it work to try to insert some sort
> of COM control into these cells, rather than using Excel to manage the text?
> Could we still get the auto-sizing to work?
>
> If so, what would the appropriate control be, and where might I go to find
> examples of how to code this?
>
>
>

Text Boxes or embedded Word documents ccould be used, but neither would
actually be integral parts of the "records" in the file.

What about creating Hyperlinks to external Word/Text files for those records
that need that kind of volume?

HTH |:>)

"Walter Harley" wrote:

> I'm helping a non-computer-savvy friend with an Excel spreadsheet that is
> used to manage a theater production. One page of this sheet is used for
> entering notes on the evening's show, e.g., problems with costumes, changes
> for lighting, etc.
>
> Sometimes these comments are empty or just a few words. Sometimes they are
> mini-essays, up to 30 or 40 lines of text. The cells containing the text
> need to resize appropriately, and need to (of course) display all the text
> they contain.
>
> She is running into big problems with Excel's behavior on cells that contain
> large amounts of text. As we all know, autosizing does not work with merged
> cells, which these are; okay, there are macro solutions. But also, autowrap
> does not work beyond a certain number of characters, and I have not found
> any solutions for that.
>
> It seems we're simply trying to make Excel do something it's not meant to
> do. So, what is the right answer? Would it work to try to insert some sort
> of COM control into these cells, rather than using Excel to manage the text?
> Could we still get the auto-sizing to work?
>
> If so, what would the appropriate control be, and where might I go to find
> examples of how to code this?
>
>
>

"Bob Umlas, Excel MVP" <[email protected]> wrote in
message news:[email protected]...
> Maybe you should consider using textboxes instead of cells to contain such
> large chunks of text; these are resizable.

Thanks, Bob. Can you give me a little more information on what you mean?
I'm not sure what a "textbox" is.

From the user's perspective, the important thing is that they click where
they want to type, and start typing, and when they're done (and leave the
cell by clicking somewhere else) they can see what they typed. I think it
might be confusing if, upon clicking in a cell, the visuals changed (in the
way that they do when I embed something like a Wordpad doc).