Ok, I’m bored tonight waiting for a release and thought I would again remind myself what to do when SQL Server 2000 refuses to write data longer than 256 characters in an excel spreadsheet. This seems to be a Jet 3.5 and 4.0 bug and the work around is published here…
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281517
So, next time get your hands dirty and edit the registry or your data will be cut off at the 255 character when exporting from SQL Server into .xls format or when saving from .xls format into .csv.