I don't think that is the issue. I want less "leading" - which as I understand it is the vertical spacing automatically added by the font to separate lines from each other. Certainly it would also be good to have small "ascenders" and "descenders" (forgive me if those are not the right terms), but overall I want something which does not look too different from Arial, but behaves as though one had reduced the line spacing below 1 - which is, of course, perfectly possible in every MSOffice program except Excel.

I have put a screenshot up on Imgur:

http://i.imgur.com/mGmxzUL.png

Not sure how to show an image. Does the forum allow uploading of a screenshot?

I have scanned every Excel forum I can find, and looked at a lot of fonts. All the font producers seem to assume (perfectly reasonably) that one's software will handle vertical spacing. Every response on excel forums says "Excel does not provide any way to adjust in-cell line-spacing".

I use Excel as a project management tool, and like to have large tables which are regularly sorted by row, with cells in which the text is wrapped. The in-cell line spacing defaults to a much-too-spacious setting. The only way to reduce it is to use multiple rows in excel, but I cannot do that if I want to sort by row.

It seemed to me that, if one cannot use the software to fix the issue, perhaps one could find an unusually vertically squashed font that would achieve a similar (albeit clunky) result?

Sorry. I didn't mean to sound silly. I should not have said "everyone knows", but it is a very common complaint and I was getting very frustrated by it. :(

As everyone knows, Excel provides no way to control line spacing in "wrapped text" cells. The only answer would be to use a font which has less than usual "leading" (if that is the word) built in. Does anybody know of one?