="!!<"&Sheet1!A1&"!!"

seems to work fine for me, as does

=CONCATENATE("!!<",Sheet1!A1,"!!")

Original cell on sheet 1 was 405 characters / Dest cell on sheet2 is 411
characters

Didn't try in 97, but works in 2000/2002/2003

--
Regards
Ken....................... Microsoft MVP - Excel
Sys Spec - Win XP Pro / XL 97/00/02/03

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It's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission :-)
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"EaglesNest" wrote in message
...
I have a spreadsheet with descriptions that are well over the 255
character
limit for a cell. I need to move that data to another sheet and add
characters to the beginning and end of the string. The formula that I use
is
=concatenate("!!<",CellDataFromOriginalSheet,"!!) that formula works for
all cells in the original sheet with the exception of those that are
longer
than 255 characters. It truncates those that are longer. If I do a
simple
range copy from the original sheet to the new sheet then all of the cell
contents are copied over and it will not truncate. How can I add the
beginning !!< and ending !! characters to the entire content of the
sheet?
Now before you tell me to edit each line seperately please be advised that
there are 3,046 lines of description that need to be copied to the new
sheet.

I was going to try a find and replace but there isn't any one character
that
I can search on at the beginning.