In an Excel 2007 spreadsheet, if you have long text in a a cell, the text may appear as a line of "#"--it can't fit in the cell. To fix this, take these steps

1. Right click in the cell (or column, etc), and click "format cells."

2. Under "Number," change from Text to General. This is the non-intuitive part that seems to have changed with Office 2007.

3. On the Alignment tab, select "Wrap Text." This is the older part, always been true.

4. You may also need to check that your row hight is not set to a fixed number. From the ribbon, select Format -> Row Height and check.

You can now post new messages to a Basecamp project directly from your email. Users have asked for this for some time, and it will be a most useful feature. Previously, you could respond to a message from email, and now you can initiate a new discussion.

The trick is to find out your unique email address for projects you want to post to and put that in your address book. Here is the explanation from 37Signals:

http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2010/02/new-in-basecamp-post-a...

Dropbox is intuitive to get started with,yet a lot of power sits behind the scenes. Here is a page with dropbox tips and techniques:

http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks

and here are some cool add-ons for web integration and other ideas:

http://wiki.dropbox.com/DropboxAddons

Not familiar with dropbox.com? We at database designs are great fans. Dropbox has several faces:

* ability to sync files between your own desktop and notebook computers, or work and home
* ability to have a shared project folder
* ability to track versions of documents  

Recent news that the China-originated attacks on human rights' activists targeted their GMail accounts have gotten many folks thinking about the security of GMail.

First, you should make sure that you have GMail set to use HTTPS connections. This is less essential if you always check email from within a secure network. Especially if you use public, unsecured wireless, you need to check this setting.  

Chrome makes for a clean, speedy alternative to IE or Firefox, especially if you live a lot in the land of Google. One persistent challenge is memory usage. Chrome gobbles up tons of memory as you open more tabs and browse from one page to another. Here's some tips for Windows users at least.

* Shift-Escape brings up the Chrome task manager. You can see which tabs, including all those new extensions you might be adding, are consuming which amounts of memory. Closing tabs will release some memory.  

There is no sensible reason to keep using Internet Explorer 6. Microsoft is up to IE8, and IE 6 is not standards compliant, fast or safe. It takes extra work to test a site for it, yet many people still use it. If you are a web developer and need to test a site for IE6 compatibility, you can still install it on Windows XP or do other tricks to have it available.

Here's an alternative way to test according to Elbert F, at http://elbertf.com/:  

"Wappalyzer shows you which software is used on the page you're currently at." You install it as an add-on to Firefox and then use it to determine whether the site uses Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla or other content management systems, or for that matter, other web tool libraries. Even if you are not techy, you may find it useful in evaluating what your next website should use.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10229

If you use other browsers, you can also use wappalyzer as a bookmarklet.

The developer appreciates a $5 donation. Read more about him at http://elbertf.com/  

The folks at Alpha 5 have a useful spreadsheet format comparison of Microsoft Access, the various Filemaker versions, and Alpha 5. Useful for the comparisons and also just to see the specs and limits for your favorite database. Check it out here: http://www.comparealphafive.com/

And here is their blog site for more details: http://blog.alphasoftware.com/search/label/Comparison%20grid

Though we should never underestimate Microsoft's ambitions, this hidden feature has useful, if less grandiose value. This feature allows you to get to an extended Control Panel and see, adjust virtually all Windows settings in one place.

Ina Fried, who blogs at cnet.com's "Beyond Binary" site http://news.cnet.com/beyond-binary, explains how:

"By creating a new folder in Windows 7 and renaming it with a certain text string at the end, users are able to have a single place to do everything from changing the look of the mouse pointer to making a new hard-drive partition.  

On March 10, 2010, Massachusetts' new data safety legislation will take effect. This law, known as 201CMR17, requires all organizations who manage data to have a pro-active plan for preventing identity theft and other problems due to insecure systems and practices.

Long time advocate for simple, everyday security consciousness, Adam Frost, has provided a good beginning point for planning at http://www.201cmr17.com/. His company, Computer Care and Learning, provides consulting support in creating compliance plans.