Have moodle devs considered changing the activity names to a vertical structure more akin to the activity completion to make viewing the gradebook more manageable? See attached.


In the meantime, With a little css you can achieve that - I'll post the code when I get into work
Garth, I hear you.
However, the problem might be that since the nature of this resource (i.e, the grade book "spreadsheet") one could ask is it better to scroll left, or down? If we flip the grade item titles 90 degrees, and the title is long, then I would have to scroll down to see all the students. So I am not sure which is better.
It is interesting that some years ago, Blackboard (or maybe it was D2L) had a decent solution. Each grade book item had both a regular name and a "short name." In the grade book, the short name was used. (From what I can tell, the current Canvas method is a bit strange because the width of each column has a lot of dead space, maybe 35%-45%. See below.)
So, this idea of each activity having both a short name and regular name might be an approach to fixing the grade book display problem. However, one more "field" of information would need to be entered, or an auto-abbreviation method employed. I sense that this concept would take some serious thinking about the best way to implement it. Of course, there would probably need to be another setting for the grade book "Display short name (Y)?"
A possible quick fix might be a grade book setting that says "Rotate titles 90 degrees (N)?"