Knowledgebase: General

Excel Character Limits Per Cell

 
  • Issue:
    When opening up an exported CSV file in Excel, data in certain rows may get split into multiple columns.
  • Cause:
    There may be too much data in a particular cell, thereby making everything shift over to the next column in order to display the data in the file

Typically this happens when exporting a product or category CSV file from the store and opening it up directly into Excel. Certain cells containing a large amount of HTML and text data (i.e. descriptions) will appear to shift over to the next cell in the row and corrupt the formatting of the CSV file.

The reason this happens is because Excel (and other spreadsheet programs) have a limit on the number of characters allowed per cell. The limit is usually 32,000 characters per cell, and once the cell data exceeds this amount, the data gets truncated to the next cell and so on.

To be clear however, the issue is not being caused by the Shift4Shop store's export or creation of the CSV file, but rather by a limitation in the spreadsheet software used for viewing the file.


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