Thursday, April 26, 2012

Excel Formula Field Only Shows Last Two Characters

Okay, this is a dumb one. When highlighting any cell it only shows the last two characters in the formula field.

Can't seem to find a permanent fix yet, but it seems to happen only when using two monitors. The workaround is to view Excel in the primary monitor and the formula field then shows all the cell's contents.

And from my searches, this seems to have been happening since Excel 97...good stuff.

15 comments:

  1. OMG, this TOTALLY "fixed" my problem! I was about to scrap my entire workbook until I found this answer. I use three monitors (primary and two secondaries) and this is exactly the case.

    What's up Microsoft?

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  2. This is happening to me too!!! Thank god I found this post and I can eliminate hallucinations as the culprit. How is this still a thing?

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  3. Thank you. This is really been bothering me

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  4. thank you... I thought I was going crazy.

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  5. Thanks so much for posting this!!! I would have never figured this out if I hadn't read this. And, yes, I was experiencing the same problem (seeing only two of the last characters in each cell) which fixed itself when I moved my excel file to my primary monitor. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

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  6. This is strangest thing I've EVER encountered in Excel. Thanks for your help.

    P.S. Does anyone know WHY it does this? It just seemed to start randomly

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  7. I know its been a while since this post was made but I've discovered something interesting about this. At least in my case this only appears to occur when my primary monitor is on the right. When I changed my display settings so that the left monitor was primary I no longer had this issue on either monitor.

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  8. Same deal, making left monitor the primary cures this puzzle. Thanks for the help.

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  9. I just had this issue, and it is bizaar, what I did was lower the resolution on the screen that did not show the full number and that settled the issue all together.

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  10. Thanks for posting. It saved my day and even more than that!

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  11. I experienced this for the first time today and it was doing my head in, just wanted to say thank you so much for your post about this!

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  12. yep, been going crazy with this one too. thanks for the info

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  13. Changed the primary and secondary screen positions from left to right which then worked then swapped it back again and it continued to work, true story

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  14. Thanks for the post! Excel 2010 here, same effect. It seems Microsoft developers never use multi-monitor setup :)

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