Conclusions Field Character Limit

Q: “What is the character limit of the conclusions field? Can that size be changed to allow for more characters? On a rare report, not all of the conclusions field appears in the Excel report after exporting.”

A: There is no limit on both the Notes and Conclusions fields in LIMS. Both are stored in an Access field with a Memo data type, which has no character limit. However, there is a 512-character limit when exporting fields to Excel. Beginning with LIMS version 2.2, released in November of 2000, this limit was imposed when we discovered Excel 97 consistently crashed with longer memo fields. Recent tests show that Excel 2002 still exhibits the same problem but Excel 2010 successfully handled doubling the limit to 1024 characters. We plan to make the character limit when exporting to Excel configurable in a future version.