Rotating text entries

Long column headings tend to inflate the width of the individual columns in order to display all their characters. These are the leading culprits in making tables of data much wider than they need to be - often preventing an otherwise manageable table from fitting on the page when printed. Instead of widening the columns just to display long headings, you can often keep those column widths down to a reasonable size simply by rotating their column headings. You'd be surprised how much real estate you can save by rotating column headings up even as little as 45 degrees.

To squeeze columns down to one character wide for forms that just use check boxes, rotate the column headings 90 degrees counterclockwise or select the orientation wherein the characters appear one over the other. (To do the latter, select the Alignment tab of the Format Cells dialog box and click the sample that shows the word Text with the characters aligned this way.)