Find failure in large cells

I have a very large excel file (on-line store products). Today I was doing a major revision using Find & Replace. Much to my dismay I discovered that some of the cells that contained the "find string" were not found and not replaced. Further research shows that if a cell has > 1060 characters in it then the cell is not searched for the "find string". Once I found a offending cell I also found that none of the other global changes I had made over the last ???? time frame had been made either. --- what a mess ---

It is not an option to reduce the # of characters per cell

Any ideas how I can get the find & Replace function to work on these cells?

This may be accomplished using VBA. Can you post a sample of the file so we can see what we are working with?

I'm not the best at VBA, but I'll see if I can get something done for you.

The .xls file is over 9,000 records long by 25 cells wide. Attached is a txt file of the contents of a single offending cell.

Thank you very much BigBas for your time and effort.

However, I need a full feature search and/or search replace function.
(you know, like the ability to search only hi-lighted cells, step search replace,
report count for search and/or replace all, etc., etc.

What I was hoping to get from this group was:
"Hey you idiot just reformat those cells from general to text or xxxx"
or "upgrade to version xxx and the cell character limit is increased to xxx"
or at least a confirmation that the 1060 character limit that I've bumped into is real and normal and not some freaky thing that happens only on my system because of my setup.

I suppose if this is a real excel limit then a external search/replace function is not out of the question. But as I said above it would need to be a VERY capable full feature tool. In fact, it could use a few more features then the existing excel function.

BTW, I'm using Excel 97 SR-2

Although I can't guarantee that this is the reason, I think this link explains why the problem exists:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/211580

The format that I gave you simply exploits the fact that functions still do work on the cells. (Although your search word may be after the 1,024 character cutoff, a search function can still detect it).

Needless to say, my solution was a very general/basic setup that did a mass change based on simple criteria. If you do need a more comprehensive tool, why not post your needs specifically. Maybe another member or I can meet those needs.

Well, a little playing around seems to support your assumption. The Excel Find function only looks at the first 1024 characters of the cell.

Now that is just plain dumb.