how do you change text orientation to vertical

Hi David,

Before you give up on Numbers, please tell where and how do you want your vertical text to appear.

Is this what you want?

Numbers (to my knowledge) can not rotate text in a cell. I cheated. I used Numbers to create a text box on a blank part of the canvas (outside a table) and rotated the box by 90 degrees in Inspector > Metrics > Rotate:

I dragged that text box to the table to cover Cell A2. I dragged the Text box handles to resize the text box to fit cell A2.

Repeat for other cells in Row 2.

The text in the text boxes will act as labels only, and will not be available as cell contents in formulas.

You may need to set the fill of the text boxes to white if you need to hide any real text or values in the *actual* cells of Row 2.

Regards,

Ian.

Message was edited by: Yellowbox. Row 2, not Row 1, has the text boxes covering the cells.

Here's a suggestion which may or may not satisfy your needs. Type your text with a Return after each letter then select the text and center. You may set the cells to automatically resize to fit content (Table Inspector) or do it manually as you see fit.

Walt

Morning David

As I don't use Numbers much so I can't help enough. I know it has more features than the table in Pages and also that you can create "pages" with you spreadsheet. Why not ask in the Numbers forum Numbers and also read in the Number User Guide Numbers '09 - User Guide .

A table in Pages can't spread over several pages sideways and only continue to the next page downward if the table is inline. Tables in Pages doesn't behave the way tables do in Word. You wont be able to fir 30 columns with text on one page. I think Numbers would be a better application for your task.

David,

Pages has the flexibility with tables to rotate them 90-degrees, but neither Pages no Numbers can format text such that it reads from the side. It's just not supported in any iWork app. I hope that helps you to make your decision. iWork apps have many good features, but if you can't live without sideways text format in an un-rotated table, you may have to consider something else.

Jerry

woodhouse1898 wrote:

Thanks Yellowbox for your contribution - that is the page layout that I desire but I think Microsoft Word wins - it is so simple with Word cannot believe Apple's Pages cannot do the same..........Apple technicians take note please!

Regards

David

They don't read this. If you have a suggestion for them, Submit Feedback from the Pages Menu.

Jerry

If you are talking about composing Chinese/Japanese standard vertical text, Pages does not have that feature and you will have to use another app.