Rotating text through 180 degrees (XP/2002)

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I apologise for returning to this subject, but I wonder whether, in the year since it was last raised, anyone has come up with a good solution to the problem I will attempt to describe, for Word/XP?

Let us assume we have a sheet of card, either A4 or US Letter size, and we fold it in half to make the “Name Card” we all have to fill out and put in front of us when we go to courses, with our own name and our company name visible on each side, as in
Joe Bloggs
Widgets Incorporated
It’s a bit big, but, hey, our company is rich enough to afford a whole sheet of card per person!

How can we cause this to print in Word/XP? One way would be in Portrait mode to do a table with one column and two rows, and in the lower of the two cells put the text as described above — but how do we write the same text, inverted, in the upper cell, so that when the resulting printed card is folded it can be read correctly from either side? There seems to be no option in Format => Text Direction to rotate text through 180 degrees, just through +90 degrees or -90 degrees.

Those sneaky persons among you will ask, why not reorientate the page to give Landscape, and then rotate the text in what is now the left-hand cell through +90 degrees, and the text in what is now the right-hand cell through -90 degrees? Yes, it works (and I love the way the lines in the “Justification” icons also change direction!), but surely there should be a simpler mechanism that would work in Portrait mode — without having to resort to WordArt?

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None that I am aware of. As you said, “There seems to be no option in Format => Text Direction to rotate text through 180 degrees, just through +90 degrees or -90 degrees.”

So your only choice, AFAIK, is the landscape mode an +90 on one half and -90 on the other.

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I found this article Creating upside down or rotated text in Word which seems to agree that you just can’t do “upsidedown text”, except via the Landscape method. But it doesn’t answer the question why the designers did not include the option to rotate text through 180 degrees, when they did to rotate it through a right-angle. I suppose it went onto the “too difficult for the moment” pile…

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I don’t know if it was in the “Too difficult pile”, becasue how hard would it be to rotate another 90 degrees.

I’d bet that it was probably in the “Who would want to do that anyway” pile.

Now we know who wants too

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Suggestion/Thought?? If you do not have to do it in Word, you can do it in PowerPoint. You can do it in Word using WordArt. In PowerPoint, you could create a template and simply place the new material into the blank template. You might be able to do something in Word using WordArt and a simple macro to duplicate, rotate it and fill it in with solid black. HTH

Ron M

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You could put your text in a Text box. Then copy and Paste > Special > Enhanced Metafile. The newly pasted picture can be rotated at will. Text in enhanced metafile format prints well, so it should do what you want.

StuartR

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Once again WOPR comes through

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Hi Stuart:
I tried this in Word 97, but couldn’t find a way to rotate the text. When I rotated the picture, the text stayed the same.

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I’m sure I’ve done this in the past, but I just checked and you seem to be correct, you can’t rotate the text this way. Sorry.

StuartR

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Oh, well. And my hopes were up momentarily.

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You could create your text in a graphics programme and paste it into word – that will definitely let you flip it…

StuartR

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It worked in Word 2002

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Create a text box. Fill in the required information and formatting. Then CUT the text box and Paste Special as a picture. The text can then be rotated in fixed increments of 90 degrees or free rotated and placed in the correct position on the page..

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Create a text box. Fill in the required information and formatting. Then CUT the text box and Paste Special as a picture. The text can then be rotated in fixed increments of 90 degrees or free rotated and placed in the correct position on the page..

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I believe I have got a really elegant solution to this problem. Hence, better late than never, I thought.

There is a little-known “camera” function icon in Excel which directly converts any selected cell or cells into an MS-Office Picture object by a single click on an icon, which can then be pasted anywhere — into a Word document, for example. So, for example, I can get 60-degree sloped text in a cell in Excel converted to a Picture object.

The camera icon can be dragged onto any toolbar by going to Tools|Customise|Commands (Tab) and scrolling under “Tools” Menu to the Camera Icon and Function. For some strange reason, this function is not available in Word.

This applies to Office 2000 and over.

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I believe I have got a really elegant solution to this problem. Hence, better late than never, I thought.

There is a little-known “camera” function icon in Excel which directly converts any selected cell or cells into an MS-Office Picture object by a single click on an icon, which can then be pasted anywhere — into a Word document, for example. So, for example, I can get 60-degree sloped text in a cell in Excel converted to a Picture object.

The camera icon can be dragged onto any toolbar by going to Tools|Customise|Commands (Tab) and scrolling under “Tools” Menu to the Camera Icon and Function. For some strange reason, this function is not available in Word.

This applies to Office 2000 and over.

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I suppose it’d have to be an Australian to come up with a solution, right? (grin!)

You mean like this? (attached).
Today I am organising my CD collection.
I have a shoebox that needs cards that peep above the CDs so that I can easily find a CD.
I started with a table, two large cells per page, column extending halfway across the page. I figured on printing half the document, then feeding the card stock in verso to print the second half of the table (column) alongside the first.
Trouble is, I want the words to be on the very top edge of the card, and the HPLJ4L won’t let me use the top one inch of a sheet.
So I figured on placing my text immediately below the vertical half-way mark on the card, and when I cut the card in half, my text will be immediately at the top of the cut half.
The sample document represents only two of my 24 cds, so I’ll be printing twelve pages. I’ll insert six sheets, then re-insert the six sheets rotated to make four cards per page with the text at the physical boundary of the cut card stock.
In your case, the text would be somewhat duplicated, not 24 unique entries, and your text would appear at the physical boundary of the folded card stock, no?

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You have 24 CDs? What a collection!

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My solution to the “upside down text” problem is really to use regular text, but to place the sheet in upside down, isn’t it? It’s the same genre as double-sided printing on an old 4ppm like mine.

I was toying, too, with grabbing the table text and instituting it as a Header on each page. 24 CDs, 24 sections, 24 pages, but that doesn’t let me print within 1mm of the “top of the sheet”.

>You have 24 CDs?
More than that really. I should have said “24 CD cases. Some cases have more than one CD. I realised after I posted that I don’t have 6 sheets of card, so the entire project is on hold until next time I visit the mall. It’s only 2 weeks ago that I discovered I had the 4CD Office 2000 set. I’ve spent 12 months developing in WordXP, and re-booting a Win/98-Off97 machine to migrate downwards to 97 so that my XP code can be used on the client’s 2000 machines.

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