Text Fields - Topic

I have a table that stores comments in an A80 field. There are 2 keys to the table, a claim number and a comment sequence key. So, there are multiple comment entries for a given claim number. Some claims have up to 105, 80 byte lines with comments. I want to concatenate all of the A80 comments into one field and display in an excel report. I tried to do this, however the maximum field length seems to be 4000. Next, I thought of creating a text field.
Any ideas?

Posts: 9 | Registered: October 24, 2006

Leah

Virtuoso

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Don't have the maximum at the top of my brain this AM, but could you create multiple fields and then could not the cells be combined in excel after the fact. Of course is there a maximum number of characters for a cell in excel?

Leah

Posts: 1317 | Location: Council Bluffs, IA | Registered: May 24, 2004

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Kerry

Expert

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Hi gkata,

Has this issue been resolved? Did Leah's suggestion help you? Many thanks to Leah's input.

I asked our internal people, did a bit googling on limitations in Excel, and came across the following topic which may be of interest:

Description of Excel 2000 specifications

Please notice that the maximum number of character in a cell in Excel is 32,767 characters. Only 1,024 display in a cell; all 32,767 display in the formula bar. So I am wondering, approximately how long can your concatenated comment be?

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Kerry

Kerry Zhan
Focal Point Moderator
Information Builders, Inc.

Posts: 1948 | Location: New York | Registered: November 16, 2004

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susannah

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gkata
WF has the best text handling capabiities on the planet.
you'll want to create a single field that is the concatenation of all the individual fields
however the final field need NOT be as long as all its inputs.
You'll want to perform some basic cleanup operations on each of the source text fields before you begin the strong concatenation. eg
LJUST to make sure each field is left -adjusted
SQUEEZ to make sure embedded double blanks are reduced to a single.
ARGLEN to figure out exactly how long the content is of any given field

Read the section in the 4th manual (Using Functions) on Text Functions, you'll get alot of ideas. Strong concatenation || removes trailing blanks at the end of the first field when concatenating the second.
FIELD1/A10='RICKY ';
FIELD2/A10='LUCY ';
NEW_WEAK/A20=FIELD1 | FIELD2;
NEW_STRONG/A20=FIELD1 || FIELD2 ;