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Why would I want ####### showing in a cell is there something I am missing
I am using a fomula to write a value I enter in one sheet so it displays on another sheet ='Worksheet1'!E9. The problem is that the value is showing up as ####### becasue the value is too long for the cell that is displaying it; how do I display the value so a person can read it? I don’t want to increase the cell size because I have other cells in the column which require that size.
What am I missing that people want to read ####### I’ve asked people and no one can make any sense of #########. Shouldn't the default be to show the value????
What am I missing that people want to read ####### I’ve asked people and no one can make any sense of #########. Shouldn't the default be to show the value????
Is the value text, numeric, date/time?
How is the cell formatted?
How is the cell formatted?
If there was a negative time value and you weren't using the 1904 date system (which is the default setting in Excel) you would see this also.
Possible solutions:
if it is a decimal, round to 2 places
try using scientific notation
use a smaller font size
As mentioned previously the default for excel is to display the ##### or hashes.... due to the fact you have exceeded the number of characters for this cell. And to prevent a person from misinterpreting the data as the true value the cell is filled with the hash key. As mentioned you can reduce the number of decimal places, if the data will still fit into this cell, if not it will still fill up with the hash symbol. the second thing as previously suggested is user a small font size for just this cell. The third thing you can maybe merge two cells so it can display a larger number. (this is not the same thing as making the column larger).
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I can understand not wanting to misrepresent the number I still don't understand why the number dosn't overflow the cell so you can read the entire number.
But you can read the entire number, all you need to do is click on the cell which you want to read the number, and it will show in the bar where you edit the text. You just will not be able to read the number if you print out the spread sheet as it will just show the hash symbols.
Suppose the value was 12345678901234567890123456
but the cell was sized so that you could only see 12345.
If all you saw was 12345, you might mistakenly think the value contained was 12345, and there would be no indication that you cannot see the entire value.