Export to excel truncates text to 255 characters - is this a feature or a bug - is there a workaround?

Hmm, are the fields that are being truncated Text fields and not multi-line text fields?

If you create a multi-line text fields, you have the option to set a max character length.

I would think the the text field is a standard varchar(255) field, a historical limit for varchar text fields.

It is a multiline text field with a limit of 0 (no limit) - but the point is that there are more than 255 characters in the field in Quickbase.  It gets truncated after export by excel.  See my response below.

Thanks.

weird, I just tested in my QB on a multiline field.  I added 2,200 characters to the field and saved as spreadsheet.

When I open the exported excel sheet, the cell is truncated but once I double click that cell, all 2,200 characters are shown.

Silly question, but have you selected the Excel cell and formatted to Wrap Text?

Yes and it is truncated.

We verified this is a problem with excel which Microsoft acknowledges here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/213841

Excel truncates the field when it opens it - which is weird because you can type much more info into a cell in excel than 255 chars.

There is a workaround - select the Format "Tab-Delimited Values" when you export from Quickbase. Open a blank spreadsheet and format the column that will contain the long text as Text. Then open the file you exported with a plain text editor such as Notepad (recommend not using MS Word) and copy and paste the contents back into Excel.  Thanks to Tim Phan of CH2M Hill for the workaround.

Any more updates on this topic?