Excel: Only Part of Text File with Quotation Marks is Read

• Microsoft Excel for the Macintosh, versions 2.2, 3.0, 4.0

SUMMARY

If Microsoft Excel encounters a quotation mark (") when opening a text file and does not encounter a second quotation mark within 256 characters, the text file being read may be truncated at that point.

Excel sees the first quotation mark as the start of a string. If the second quotation mark (closing quotation mark) is not encountered within 256 characters (the maximum number of characters in a cell), it may not be seen by Excel. Because all information after the 256th character in a cell is truncated, the remainder of the file (and the second quotation mark, if there is one) is truncated.

To correct this problem, open the text file in a word processor and use the word processor's search and replace feature to remove all the quotation marks in the file. If some quotation marks are necessary, make sure that for every opening quotation mark there is a closing quotation mark, and that the opening and closing quotation marks are within 256 characters of each other (this includes spaces).