This discussion group is specific to MS PRoject project management
software - you'd find more information by posting in an Excel group. That
being said, there's no way to increase the number of columns in Excel. 256
is a "magic number" for most computer applications - Excel, Access, SQL
Server, Oracle AFAIK, etc etc - all have a maximum of 256 fields per table.
400 + fields is a real oddity, even in the mainframe world. I've generally
found that once a database has more than about 40 fields it usually can and
should be normalized into multiple related tables - there are exceptions of
course but for some reason it usually just works out that way with real
world data. One thing is certain, for large data table like you have, Excel
is probably going to prove a poor choose of tool to work with, not only
because of the 256 columns but also because the maximum row count means
you're limited to 65000 rows, a miniscule record count for most real
database applications, and you can't related different tables to each other
as you can in a real database. If you simply must move the data off the
mainframe for further manipulation, I'd suggest you use a real database
managment tool like Access or SQL Server and a properly normalized
relational table structure, importing the data into a set of relationed
tables of < 256 fields each.
