text keeps disappearing at the bottom of the cell

Can you post a screen shot?

If the text extends across a cell border, it is in an unstable state. In my experience Numbers will look for any excuse to wrap or hide any text that crosses either a row or column boundary, especially when you are working with large strings.

If you make your cell size adequate for your entries, you should have better behavior.

Jerry

Hi Neko,

No solution, but after a brief experiment, I can confirm your observation.

No returns in my sample, as I didn't change my preference on the result of pressing return.

I expanded a cell (B2) of an empty table, then repeatedly pasted a block of about 1200 characters into that cell, resizing the cell and scrolling the display as needed to keep the bottom boundary of the cell visible.

Eventually the pasting resulted in no change in the display, and I noted that the last word shown was not the last word of the text I was pasting.

I pressed command-A to select all of the text in the cell, then pasted it into a new Pages word processing document and got a character count of 14579, which would lead me to believe a cell can contain about 16000 characters (approximately 2^14).

I then went back to Numbers, placed the insertion point immediately after the last visible character, and selected the text from there back to the beginning of text in the cell.

Pasted into a new Pages wp document, this gave me a count of 13028 characters (and just over 2000 words).

Some fiddling with font sizes showed that changing the size affected how many characters were displayed—bigger font, fewer characters—and that eventually lead to an Aha! moment.

What you're seeing is the bottom of the 'page.'

Numbers will split a table only between rows and between columns; it will not produce a page break inside a column or row. Apparently, this applies when not in print view as well. There appears to be a maximum 'virtual' page size beyond which cells may be extended, but beyond which the content of those cells will not display.

I didn't pay close enough attention to the details to determine what affects the maximum cell height on that 'virtual' page. Changing page orientation from landscape to portrait had no immediate effect. It did increase from about 29 cm to about 43 cm when I changed the paper size specified from US Letter to Tabloid, but did not revert to 29 cm when I changed back to US Letter.

Not enough to draw any specific conclusions, but enough to say that there IS a limit to the amount of text that can be displayed, and it appears to be smaller than the limit to how much text can be contained in a cell. Further investigation might lead you to a solution, or at least to a better knowledge of these limits.

Regards,

Barry

Message was edited by: Barry

I, too, can verify the weirdness.

Here is a screenshot of some of the weirdness. Notice how the cell full of text (cell B2) is spilling over the rows below it. It will look normal (but the text will be more truncated) after I click on another cell.

and here is what it looks like when I make the cell height larger. There is room for more text than what is showing and there is more text in the cell than what is showing.

I got that too, among other things. Kept changing as I played with dimensions.

Jerry

All,

The "spilling" over is a phenomenon that occurs often. It is often obscured when there is content in adjacent cells. My recollection is the same phenomemon occurs with Excel.

And how to fix that ?

Hi sekonda2016,

This a REALLY old thread, already marked solved, referring to a discontinued version of Numbers. Perhaps you should start a new thread with specifics describing your problem.

SG