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Notes field in MS 2000

11 replies [Last post]
Thu, 2008-04-24 06:31
Douglas Young
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hI, Does anyone know how what the total amount of characters allowed in the task notes field, and if there’s a way of increasiong the length of characters?
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Fri, 2008-04-25 07:19
#1
Douglas Young
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Nice try Trevor....yeah,the notes field is displayed in the gantt chart,,but it only shows 255 characters. I’ll try google, though I thought this forum would be better,,,since is allegedly full of planners. Think most of them are planners on their granny’s side,,just kidding ! Need to go and sort my subPrime mortgage,,cheers
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Fri, 2008-04-25 07:03
#2
Trevor Rabey
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Search Google Groups for the newsgroupmicrosoft.public.project and try "character limit in notes" or "notes field limit" similar. It has come up many times.

How are you or your boss hoping to display the Notes?
How about a Report?
How about Insert Hyperlink?
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Fri, 2008-04-25 04:34
#3
Douglas Young
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Thanks Trevor,,,it doesn’t work, my boss is getting really hacked off...cheers
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Fri, 2008-04-25 04:32
#4
Trevor Rabey
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This is just off-the-cuff, not checked etc.
You can put a lot of stuff in the Notes field but you can’t display more than 255 characters of it in a report or in the Gantt Chart etc.
But if you copy and paste it into a spare text field you can display the entire content of the text field.
This is either right or wrong. Give it a shot.
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Fri, 2008-04-25 04:06
#5
Douglas Young
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I know that the cell has lots of cahracters (with your "we don’t do that here", comment) but in any views, for reports etc,,,only 255 characters are shown. I can’t get round this (project 2000) Thank-you.
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Thu, 2008-04-24 13:35
#6
L.E.N. Lewis
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It appears that you are looking at only the cell in the Notes column. Nobody here does that. If you want to see the contents of a Notes cell, then choose one of several ways. I click on the task row and then click on the Task Notes button.

There are a variety of constraints on the Notes field. You can only search for something in the first ~250 characters or up to the first "NewLine".

As I pointed out earlier, the number of characters you can store is significantly greater than that. In addition to the characters stored, you need to consider the hidden formatting information which you cannot see but which is embedded in the RTF that is displayed.

I have no idea how many characters can be stored in a Notes field in Project Server but you aren’t using it so that number doesn’t matter.

You should now have enough information to answer any other questions you might ever possibly consider asking about the Notes field.

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Thu, 2008-04-24 12:12
#7
Douglas Young
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I checked with Excel, it’s the same amount of characters 255,,,any clues??
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Thu, 2008-04-24 12:08
#8
Douglas Young
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Hi L.E.N. Lewis, I managed to see that. However doesn’t give indication of notes. I tried cutting and pasting into the notes field in a new file. It still only takes just under 3 lines, regardless of the text size etc. It’s such a big too (the noes filed that is)can’t understand why it onll holds such a small amount data.
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Thu, 2008-04-24 11:56
#9
L.E.N. Lewis
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In P2003 (thought this was in P2000 as well), when you start it, in the upper right corner of the window, you’ll see a little box that (when you first start the program) shows "Type a question for help". In that box, type "project specifications" (no quotes).

If you can’t find that, then press F1 and in the box beneath "Search for", type "Project specifications" (again, no quotes).

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Thu, 2008-04-24 10:41
#10
Douglas Young
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Sorry my friend, what is this query box, I’m new to MS Project.
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Thu, 2008-04-24 10:07
#11
L.E.N. Lewis
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In the little "query" box in the upper right corner, type "project specification" to see the limits.

Sadly, the size of a Notes field is not one of those described in P2003.

I took a Word file that shows as 184KB on the disk and pasted it three times into a Note field; saved the file; reopened it and looked at the Note. The complete Note was there.

My guess: it’ll hold more than you have to include and you will run into other issues (memory size, for example - particularly if you have multiple tasks with extremely large Note fields) before you run out of space in a single Note field.

"Number of characters" btw, isn’t a really good criteria. Since the file is RichText, you also have to consider all the formatting directives behind the text that you are viewing.
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