Cell displays as a series of # ; but formula bar contains data?!

Had this problem in a worksheet, and though due to time constraints we did a work-around by divinding the data into several cells, I'm trying to figure out what went wrong here.

Have data in a cell, maybe 255 characters in length; I know this is a magic limiting number in Access, but thought Excel 2003 could easily handle and display this many characters. If we trim a couple of characters off, it displays fine. Otherwise, it displays "###############".

Formating to increase the size of the column or row doesn't seem to help.



Ideas on what may be happening here?

Excel can handle 1024 characters in a cell.

Some errors will display as a full column of "#" -- like formatting a negative number as a date.

So what's in your cell?