A client of mine let me know today that the Excel spreadsheets I was generating for them had data truncated at 255 characters. I didn’t find anything on the web that gave a reason or offered a fix so I decided to dig into the code myself. I am using the Ruby Spreadsheet-Excel gem.
Sure enough, on line 289, of workbook.rb (v0.3.5.1), there was this:
# Truncate strings over 255 characters
if strlen > StrMax
str = str[0..StrMax-1]
length = 0x0008 + StrMax
strlen = StrMax
end
No idea why this was done and I wasn’t going to waste anytime considering the downsides of not truncating, so I commented this block out and it works fine.
Maybe it has something to do with an older version of Excel? Who knows.