Field Length Greater than 255 characters?

In a file geodatabase can you show text in a text field using greater than 255 characters?

I have a chunk of text (about 500 characters) and want to show this whole chunk of text in a data driven page. But it truncates it and places an asterix in the attribute table when I calculate field from an excel table.

And when I calculate a field using this large number of characters I get the following error message:

I expected a description here but it doesn't mention it:
http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/...0000000p000000

The strange thing is you can add a field specifying a 'length' of 1000+? But what is the point if this, if never displays in your attribute table or on a data driven page?


Any help or links would be appreciated.

Thanks