create vertical table or rotate table

users
#1

I'm using LibreOffice 3.4.4 on Kubuntu 11.04. I need to either create a vertical table or rotate an existing table. In table properties I noticed the "Text direction" option on the "Text Flow" tab. If I set it to "Right-to-left (vertical)", it gets close to what I need but the top of the font is to the right and I need it to be to the left. I can't seem to find any option to rotate an existing table. Any ideas?

Jason

#2

Hi.
Under the text flow tab is a vertical alignment tab. This controls the position.

Steve

#3

The "Vertical alignment" drop down box has choices of Top, Centered, and Bottom. This controls how the text is positioned in the cell but not how it is oriented. The top of the text is still to the right, not the left. What I need to do is rotate a normal table 90 degrees counter-clockwise or create a table with that positioning.

Jason

#4

Hi.
OK, this time I took a standard table, filled it with info., clicked on
a word in one cell, right click, edit paragraph style, position, 90 degrees.
All the table contents rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise, contents
centred vertically at the left side.
steve

#5

Thanks for the tip. That worked for me too and will be a good solution for creating new tables.

     As for existing tables, the columns end up reversed. Hopefully, I can figure out how to rotate an existing table so I don't have to worry about getting everything back into order

Jason
===========.

#6

Steve Edmonds wrote

OK, this time I took a standard table, filled it with info., clicked on
a word in one cell, right click, edit paragraph style, position, 90
degrees.
All the table contents rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise, contents
centered vertically at the left side.

Excellent solution! I didn't know about this and it is extremely useful!

I would suggest that instead of changing the Paragraph Style (which affects
the Style named Table Contents and therefore any Table that you add to your
document) you open Format, Styles and Formatting (or F11), right click on
Table Contents, choose New, name the Style to Vertical Table Contents and in
that Style change in the tab Position the Rotation to 90 degrees.

This allows you to apply different Styles to the Text within a Table and
therefore have Vertical and Horizontal tables and even Vertical and
Horizontal text on the same Table.

Best regards,
Pedro

#7

Rotating the text has already been described. But if your table can fit a complete page or pages, there is an alternative: interpolating landscape pages in a portrait document.

o In the table, go to Table | Table Properties... | Text Flow | Text Flow (or right-click | Table... | Text Flow | Text Flow).
o Tick Break and select Page and Before.
o Tick With Page Style, and select Landscape (or your own landscape page style) from the drop-down list.
o After the table, go to Insert | Manual Break..., select "Page break", and then select Default (or your own portrait page style) from the drop-down list.

When you print the document, you will get what you require.

The only problem is that any headers and footers will appear at the top and bottom of the landscape page, which are the sides of the page as rotated into a portrait document, and this is probably not what you would want. But it's easy to suppress headers and footers for that page, of course, which may suffice.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker