topic Importing text fields longer than 255 characters from Excel in ArcGIS Pro in ArcGIS Online Questions

Importing text fields longer than 255 characters from Excel in ArcGIS Pro

mgsaldan — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 22:12:44 GMT

I am trying to import a table from Excel that has longer text fields. No matter what I try (add data, export table, field mapping, change field length, add join, calculate field, join table, append, etc...) The data always gets cut off at 255 characters on import.

This question must have been asked before, but I can't find anything that works! Am I missing something?

Re: Importing text fields longer than 255 characters from Excel in ArcGIS Pro

MarkGo — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 22:32:17 GMT

Try exporting that Excel table to a CSV. I just created a dummy CSV that had 300 characters of junk in one of the fields, and short text in the other.
It brought in both fields as 8000 length strings without any intervention. If that hadn't worked, I was going to try altering the schema.ini to force a longer text length, but it seems to have done it natively.
I am on the newest 3.5.4 version of ArcGIS Pro.

Re: Importing text fields longer than 255 characters from Excel in ArcGIS Pro

DanPatterson — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 22:46:04 GMT

are you bringing it into a gdb?

Excel To Table (Conversion)—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

here are the limits when inside a gdb

File geodatabase size and name limits—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

Re: Importing text fields longer than 255 characters from Excel in ArcGIS Pro

mgsaldan — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 16:26:37 GMT

This worked, thank you. I had tried csv with export table tool and had no luck with that, but hadn't tried adding the csv directly to the contents pane.