Right-click the desired text, and click the Text Direction option. Select the orientation, and click OK.

The feature is a little tricky to find, since it is not accessible from either the cell or font formatting areas (or so it seems to me).

Note: The text must be located in a table or you won't see the Text Direction option on the right-click menu. Also, for older versions of Word, the only available text rotation was Word Art. I think the rotation-in-table feature was added in the 2003 version.

If you share that interest, check out the following. Well done!

A Visual Study Guide to Cognitive Biases

In case you are unfamiliar with the term, a wireframe is a mockup of a screen in a software application.

Historically, wireframes consisted of a set of mock screens, either hand-drawn or developed with a computer. A reviewer would validate design concepts by reviewing the wireframes in printed form so he could follow screen flows by juggling papers. Some people still swear by hand-drawn wireframes because they are quick to generate and require no special software. The main drawback is the impact on the review cycle: some people just can’t seem to envision the flow of screens from paper, in which case a quality review is impossible.

As an alternative, an analyst or developer can develop screens in HTML. Benefits: (1) The reviewer can click around the screens a bit to better understand activity flow. (2) The code serves as a starting point for development. Drawback: (1) The time invested is significant.

Some newer prototyping tools provide the same sort of clickable benefits as a coded HTML prototype. Benefits: (1) The process is quicker than HTML coding. (2) The wireframe analyst doesn’t need coding knowledge. Drawbacks: (1) Software licenses can cost thousands of dollars per seat. (2) No reusable code is generated.

So where is this all going?  

Some really advanced prototyping tools are already entering the market. They can export the prototype in real HTML code. Benefits: (1) It’s quicker than HTML coding. (2) No HTML coding knowledge needed. (3) HTML base code is produced. Drawbacks: (1) The system-generated code is allegedly pretty clunky, perhaps similar to the code generated when you export a Word doc as HTML. (2) The software is costly.

Still, it’s a matter of time before the tools advance to make the system-generated code more usable. And when the analyst investment noticeably reduces the development effort, those expensive software licenses will become more cost effective.

HP provided some pretty good instructions.

A couple of things they didn't mention:

• You can print the items you are going to delete. Select them on the list, click File menu > Print, select Only Selected Rows radio button, and print. I printed messages for each year, and will put them in the file for my corporate taxes that year.
• When finished, to return to your prior view, go to the View menu > Arrange By > Current View > View Month or View Week.

If you prefer to take care of each merged cell individually, to avoid unintended consequences, try this (written for Excel 2003):

1.  Open the Find and Replace dialog box.

2.  Click Options.

3.  Click Format (to the right of the Find what field).

4.  On the Alignment tab, click Choose format from cell. 

5.  Click a merged cell.

A list of merged cells is displayed in the lower pane of the Find dialog box. Click one to navigate to that reference.

There are any number of ways to do this in Microsoft Excel, but I've attached a modest attempt. Using this method, each record in each list is tagged with an identifier (a combination of name and telephone number). Then the records are compared based on identifier. You can sort a list based on a true/false column, to identify just the missing records.

For more information, check out these Microsoft-generated articles:

Use Excel to compare two lists of data

For an alternate approach involving advanced filtering: How to use advanced filter to exclude records in Excel 2000 and How to use advanced filter to exclude records

I said, "Oh, that is easy. When you are talking about yourself, you say 'self-determined.' When you are talking about someone else, you say 'stubborn.' "  :)

But privately, I've always kind of questioned the value of personality tests. For instance, it doesn't seem to me designed to determine whether someone is a pathological practice of hoarding information or putting down peers. Now THAT would be truly valuable information. Barring that kind of hard-to-get info, I think a peer's work history tells me most of what I need to know.

Anyway, today a peer on my management list pointed out this 2004 article in the New Yorker, by Malcolm Gladwell, that goes into some depth about the limitations of personality testing. I hope you find it as interesting as I did.

I particularly enjoyed the author's self-created personality test, which tests four personality dimensions: Canine/Feline, More/Different, Insider/Outsider, and Nibbler/Gobbler.

What is a technical communicator? Technical communicators develop and design instructional and informational tools needed to assure safe, appropriate, and effective use of science and technology, intellectual property, and manufactured products and services. Technical communicators combine multimedia knowledge and strong communication skills with technical expertise to educate across the entire spectrum of users’ abilities, technical experience, and visual and auditory capabilities. For more information, see http://www.stc.org/story/tc_tw.asp.