Rotating a Page of Text

Have you ever wanted to rotate the text in your Word document 90 degrees in relation to your headers and footers? As has been discussed in other WordTips, there are a couple of ways to do this using Word's native capabilities. (You can insert a text box and rotate the text within that textbox, insert a table and rotate the text within a cell, or use WordArt.) Any of these methods can be quite cumbersome and time consuming to set up and get aligned properly.

However, if you use the fact that Microsoft started including Far East language support in Word 2000, you can rotate an entire section of text clockwise, 90 degrees to your headers and footers.

To rotate the text, follow these steps:

1. Place a Next Page section break before and after the text you wish to rotate.
2. Select at least one character between those section breaks, but don't select the actual section breaks. (If you don't select at least one character in the section you wish to rotate, the entire document will be rotated.)
3. Press Alt+F11 to display the VBA Editor.
4. Make sure the Immediate window is displayed. (It should appear at the bottom of the VBA Editor. If it doesn't, press Ctrl+G.)
5. In the Immediate window, type the following and press Enter:

     Selection.Orientation = wdTextOrientationVerticalFarEast

Now your text is rotated 90 degrees to your headers and footers. Your page that contains the rotated text has had its layout changed to landscape mode, as well. You can use the Page Setup dialog box to change the page to portrait mode, and the text will still be rotated on the page.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (1776) applies to Microsoft Word 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Rotating a Page of Text.