I'm helping a non-computer-savvy friend with an Excel spreadsheet that is
used to manage a theater production. One page of this sheet is used for
entering notes on the evening's show, e.g., problems with costumes, changes
for lighting, etc.

Sometimes these comments are empty or just a few words. Sometimes they are
mini-essays, up to 30 or 40 lines of text. The cells containing the text
need to resize appropriately, and need to (of course) display all the text
they contain.

She is running into big problems with Excel's behavior on cells that contain
large amounts of text. As we all know, autosizing does not work with merged
cells, which these are; okay, there are macro solutions. But also, autowrap
does not work beyond a certain number of characters, and I have not found
any solutions for that.

It seems we're simply trying to make Excel do something it's not meant to
do. So, what is the right answer? Would it work to try to insert some sort
of COM control into these cells, rather than using Excel to manage the text?
Could we still get the auto-sizing to work?

If so, what would the appropriate control be, and where might I go to find
examples of how to code this?