MacMost Q&A Forum • View All Forum QuestionsAsk a Question

How To Limit the Numbers Of Characters In a Cell?

In google sheets I use a LEN Funtion to limit the # of characters in a cell to 20, (including spaces), or less. It gives me a warning if the # of characters exceeds 20. Is there a way to do this in Numbers? The explanation for the LEN function in Numbers doesn’t seem to indicate this ability. Thanks – JamesJM

We have to submit an order form in which each cell can contain no more than 20 characters. It is difficult to go thru the cell data (submitted by others using Google Sheets/Forms then downloaded into Numbers) and count every character in every cell… there are thousands. I would prefer to ONLY use Numbers thereby skipping the Google Sheets step.
—–
JamesJM

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Limit the Numbers Of Characters In a Cell?”

    6 months ago

    You can use LEN for this. I'm not sure what you are doing with LEN in Google Sheets, but in Numbers it gets the length of text. So if the value you want to check in in column C, then in D you could use this to check it:
    IF(LEN(C2)>20,"TOO LONG","")
    So then you have the words "TOO LONG" in column D any time you have a value in column C that is more than 20 characters in length.
    You could just scan the rows for this, or filter by that column to see only those rows until you have fixed them.

    Merina Helen
    5 months ago

    Thanks for sharing this useful tip, Gary! 🙌 For those looking to limit the number of characters in a cell in Numbers, Gary's suggestion using the LEN function is spot on. By incorporating the formula IF(LEN(C2)>20,"TOO LONG","") in column D, you can easily identify cells with more than 20 characters. This streamlines the process and eliminates the need to manually count characters.

Leave a New Comment Related to "How To Limit the Numbers Of Characters In a Cell?"

:
:
:
0/500 (500 character limit -- please state your comment succinctly and do not try to get around this limit by posting two comments)