OLE Grabbing Excel Strings is cutting short

Where is it breaking apart the string?  At a Space, a specific number of characters, at a specific cell width, at special characters?

255 chars is the length of the string it grabs. The total is around 4000 chars.
I can't seem to find any prewritten functionality to check if it is something like EndOfFile (when dealing with a regular .txt file)
Any Ideas? I am thinking if there is a EOF or some other marker in the cell I can just concantenate until it has hit that mark. Otherwise I am not sure.

Any help is much appreciated.

I also am not sure how to get another string to start reading at char 256

That is a big problem with Crystal reports as well (any version prior to Version 9).  But that is another matter...

As for your issue, I have not encountered it before... You may need to create another variable that you pass along in your query (which will be blank 90% of the time).  This variable will contain the characters from 256 to 512 (you may even want to create a additional variables to handle up to 1,000 characters).

At any rate, as mentioned above you'll need to parse your string out into segments and then reassemble them back inside your C# code.

If you are using standard SQL commands then you command should look something like:

Select col1, col2, col3, col4, decode(length(col4)>255, true, col5=mid(col4, 256,256), col5='') from tableName where Criteria= something

Oh... you may also want to check the data type you are using...

I'm assuming a string, but you may want to double check to see what the OLE has specified.  It may be using some kind of data type specific to EXCEL that obly uses 254 characters.  You may be able to change a text data type to a long text or something....

well, I am not sure how to do what you are saying.

Basically I have the field in excel named "Buyer_Field";

it contains text of up to 4000 charachters.

I use the OLE connection and do the following select command
"Select * FROM [Buyer_Field]"

I then put this into a dataAdapter
DataSet
then try and pull it out, and it is still cutting off at 255. How do I implement what you are saying in this sense.

Do I switch the select statement around? if so, to what? The Decode is not making sense to me in how it works.

Thanks very much

I thought the Decode was used for Joins between tables or cells in a database.

OleDbCommand PressRelease = new OleDbCommand("SELECT * FROM [Description_Buyer]",objConn);
OleDbDataAdapter PressReleaseAdapter = new OleDbDataAdapter();
PressReleaseAdapter.SelectCommand = PressRelease;
DataSet PressReleaseDS = new DataSet();
PressReleaseAdapter.Fill(PressReleaseDS,"XLData");
PressReleaseDataGrid.DataSource = PressReleaseDS.Tables[0].DefaultView;
                  PressReleaseDataGrid.DataBind();

This is the code to bring the string out of the cell and into a DataGrid just so I can see it.
thought you might be able to see something stupid I did or some little mistake. But this is all pretty simple and straight forward.

Decode is just like an IF statement in SQL

DECODE(Something, condition, if true, if false)

I really am not sure how to implement what you are talking about. I posted a similar question in the .NET section. I will give you the points if you show me a snippet on how that works on an example. I can send you an Excel file if you want with what is giving me the problem.