 <p>You need to wrap the textarea in an ItemTemplate tag for it to work:</p> <pre><code>&lt;asp:Repeater ID="NotesRepeater" runat="server" DataSourceID="SheetParams"&gt; &lt;ItemTemplate&gt; &lt;textarea style="clear:both; font-size:large" name="notes"&gt; &lt;%# Eval("Notes") %&gt; &lt;/textarea&gt; &lt;ItemTemplate&gt; &lt;/asp:Repeater&gt; </code></pre>