I’ve created a 10x10 grid to be used in our Super Bowl pool. I’ve written the name of one team across the top. I’d like to turn the page 90 degrees and type the name of the other team along the side. I can’t find a way to do it and the online help hasn’t helped me. Anyone know the product well enough to help me do this? Thanks, Dopers.
You don’t mention which LibreOffice application you are using. I don’t know about rotating the entire page, but in LibreOffice Calc you can control the text direction in a cell by going to Format=>Cells… and opening the “Alignment” tab. There you can set “Text Rotation” to whatever you want.
In LibreOffice Writer you can highlight the text in a table, Format=>Character…, Position tab, choose direction under “Rotation”.
Oops. Yeah, I’m using Writer. I don’t want to change the text within any of the cells, but rather to label the table along the top, which I’ve done, and along the side, which I can’t seem to figure out.
Why don’t you put the labels in cells? 11x11 table, merge the cells in the first row (except column 1) and put the top label there, merge the cells in the first column (except row 1) and put the side label there with 90 degree rotation? That leave you with 10x10 empty cells.
I am fine with that for creating the table. It’s the 90 degree rotation that I can’t figure out.
Once you have the 11x11 table with the row labels typed horizontally in the leftmost column, then follow this bit of advice from upthread:
I suspect the process will be to select the entire leftmost column, then apply the formatting as suggested.
The above advice works, i just tried it.
- Insert 11x11 table.
- Highlight all the cells in the top row, right click, select merge cells.
- Highlight all the cells in the left column, right click, select merge cells.
- Insert text into top row, click Align Center (ctrl E)
- Insert text into left column.
- Highlight text, in the Format menu, click “Character”, in the pop-up, goto the Position tab and set rotation to 90 degrees. then click OK.
- Position the text - in the Format menu, select Paragraph, in the pop-up goto the Alignment tab and select “Center”.
- Shift the text up or down using the Increase Paragraph Spacing button.
This.
The standard technique of “right angle text” in tables is to put the text into table cells and use a formatting option on those cells to rotate the text. This goes back to a fairly early version of Excel and is pretty much a standard now.
Trying to do it outside of a table while trying to maintain alignment with cell rows or columns is simply asking to be driven mad.
Cell column or row headers should be a row or column of the table anyway.
The “merge cells” part or your recipe sounds wacky to me. The goal is for each row or column label to be properly positioned in its row or column. Doing a merge cells means now you’re having to do all that justification manually instead of it happening automatically.
IMO … just leave the cells unmerged, set their justification to left, centered, or right as you prefer, populate the cells with the label text, then apply the 90 degree rotation to the ones in the leftmost column.
You could do that, but imho it looks better with one merged cell (unless
you remove all the cell borders).
He’s putting a single label for all columns above the columns, and for all rows beside the rows, not individual labels for each row and column. I think.
Yes. I think that’s what the OP wanted.
In LibreOffice Writer the rotation is a property of the text, not the table cell. In Calc (the spreadsheet program) rotation is, like in Excel, a property of the cell.
Merging is a technique that makes cell borders disappear. As a side effect of what it really does. And it brings a lot of other baggage in along as well. If you just want borders to disappear, then format them to be invisible.
I thought the opposite, but you’re right either interpretation is possible.
The OP was less than clear on what goes into the grid.