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According to the documentation, Excel has a limit of 32,767 characters per cell.

However, when I save a CSV file that looks like this:

"Cell with exactly 32,767 characters........","Cell 2"
"Cell 3","Cell 4"

It doesn't import correctly:

enter image description here

This appears to happen in both Excel 2013 and Excel Online.

My original assumption had been that it was due to escaped double quotes or some characters being treated as more than a single byte, but the same thing seems to happen with any cell content, even just normal letters.

The issue stops occurring when I reduce the cell to 32,758 or fewer characters. However, I can't find any info about this number anywhere online. Every thread that I've found repeats the 32,767 number.

So, my question would be, is Excel's actual limit for CSV imports 32,758 characters and it's gone completely unnoticed until now, or am I missing something obvious?

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    I get similar behavior. If I open or import the file using the legacy wizard, the 32,767 gets reduced to 32,759. If I import using Power Query, in the PQ editor Text.Length --> 32,767. But when I close and load to Excel, it is reduced to 32,765. However, if I create a cell in a blank PQ of length 32,767; and then save that to Excel, all characters are retained.
    – Ron Rosenfeld
    Commented Nov 28, 2020 at 11:57
  • Another point of interest. I just read the file into Excel using the FileSystemObject. The 32,767 length is maintained when writing to the worksheet. Clearly something funny going on with the import methods.
    – Ron Rosenfeld
    Commented Nov 28, 2020 at 12:23
  • 1
    using Excel for Mac (version 16.67) the limit was actually 32,641 when using File > Open to open the csv in Excel.
    – Andrew Ryan
    Commented Dec 6, 2022 at 23:10

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