I am making spreadsheets that mimic data entry screen on a web application. Some of the fields take a lot of text, up to 15,000 characters. The users also want to be able to do minimal formatting of pieces of text within the box (bold, italics, underline, font, size, for example).

I tried a very large merged cell, that allows you to highlight a piece of text, right click and format. But, of course, no scroll bars.

I tried the ActiveX text box form control. Nice scrollbar, but I couldn't highlight a chunk of text and format it.

I was going to try the non-ActiveX text box, but it's disabled on my pull down menu, and I can't figure out how to activate it.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!