Today, in Stupid Excel Tricks.

There's a thing, in Excel, where sometimes you'll want to merge cells. Instant problem: As soon as you merge cells, you can't get them to auto-adjust row height when wrapping any more.

This is a known thing about Excel. OpenOffice Calc doesn't have a problem with it, but Excel has never been able to auto-adjust row height for merged cells. And the standard workaround is "give the merged cell a name, and have a macro resize it". This is, to put it bluntly, annoying.

I've found a less annoying workaround.

Step 1: Pick a column WAAAAY off to the right. Like, "AA" or something. Something off where you're not using it and never going to look at it.
Step 2: Set the width of that column to the width of the whole merged cell range - so if you merged C3-K3, set column AA to be as wide as the whole C-K distance.
Step 3: Set the content of AA3 to be "=C3" so anything you put in C3 is duplicated far off in the vast yonder.
Step 4: Turn on text wrapping in both AA3 and the C3-K3 merge. Ta-da! Text will now wrap and row heights will autoadjust in your merged cell - because they're autoadjusting the non-merged cell in the same row, but who cares?
Step 5: Set your print area to exclude your far off column of dumb.

This, of course, IS annoying and stupid, compared to simply "making row height work right for merged cells" - but MS has claimed this is a feature, not a bug, for more than a decade now, so they obviously have no intention of fixing it. And by doing this you can get the result you actually wanted, which is nice.

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I am bored, therefore there will be Audience Participation.

What's your favourite movie that you think is obscure, and that relatively few other people will have seen, but that you think they SHOULD see?

I've got a bunch, but today I'm going to go with Weirdsville, where the plot summary on IMDB neglects to mention exactly how funny it is. In fact, between this and Todd And The Book Of Pure Evil I think I'm just going to conclude that Satanists in smalltown Ontario is always going to be comedy gold.

Anyway. Weirdsville. Scott Speedman as a stoner who owes a small-time drug dealer a lot of money, Jordan Prentice as Tyrion Lannister, Matt Frewer as Matt Frewer quietly chewing all the scenery he can reach without moving because he's in a coma for most of the film. No, really. It's funny and dark, the characters are believable and likeable[1], and I think I can count the number of people who I know have seen it on one hand.

And that's sad, because it is very much a good film.

So: What's your favourite obscure movie that you think more people should see?


[1]: Even the villains, who are dicks, are entertaining dicks who are fun to watch.

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via telemann

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"I learned to cook from the English!"

And other reasons John is no longer allowed in the kitchen unsupervised.

(PS: I have cooked with White Zinfandel *twice* recently. Once when a recipe called for white wine and we were out, one when it called for red and we were out. My takeaway: "We need more wine". Y/N?)