Using Excel XP (2002...), running on /XP....

I cannot print or display a cell containing 1500 or so characters. 
The worksheet is a single cell.  The cell is formatted as general or
text, word-wrapped and aligned to the top.  The text is pure ascii,
pasted from NotePad.  Increasing the size of the cell horizontally
affects the amount printed or displayed by a small bit -- (apparently
Excel tries to calculate how much will fit on the last line) -- but
the text is still truncated.  Increasing the size of the cell
vertically has no affect other than to add more white space at the
bottom (no additional text).  Playing with fonts (fonts, sizes) or
scaling has no real affect.

But the text is definitely there:  clicking on the cell displays all
of the text in a popup window.

Any way around this?  (We're actually trying to automate this,
extracting text from a database, so I'd pay extra for a solution that
allows auto-sizing.  But just learning how to do this manually would
be a major step.)