vertical text

At this time Numbers cannot do what you want directly.

There are several tricks people use to coerce what you want. There are several past posts addressing this. here are some:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5920981?answerId=24926855022#24926855022

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3697496?answerId=17454065022#17454065022

Hi Roger,

the flip vertically is greyed out, is this for objects only?

Yes, as far as I know, rotate works only on objects, not cells. Copy the contents of your column header and paste onto a blank place on the 'canvas'. It will become a text box. Rotate.

Now the fiddly bit. Double click in the text box to make the text layer active. Click after the text and press enter to add new lines if you need a "wider" text box.

Drag the text box over the header cell. Set the Fill to white to hide what is behind it.

Use the Alignment Guides and arrow keys to fine-tune the alignment. Set the Column width to match the text box.

Add a border to the text box if that helps.

Here is my clumsy result.

I did say it was fiddly!

Regards,

Ian.

Ian,

I often thought it would be easier to set something like this up by creating a one-column table with a row for each column, and the row height matching the appropriate column width in the main table. In Pages, where a table can be rotated, it works pretty well, but in Numbers, you can't rotate tables.

You can, however, use Preview to convert a Numbers '09 table into a pdf graphic that can be rotated.

A while ago, I played around with writing an AppleScript to automate much of the process, but I wasn't really excited about the results (as far as I can tell, AppleScript doesn't interact with cell borders, so you are stuck with default borders.)

Since SG and some others have been reviving an interest in AppleScripting Numbers, I thought i might post a link to the script, which I updated to work, as far as it goes, with Numbers 3.1. It takes the text values, text attributes and background fills from the first row of a table and produces a pdf graphic, on the sheet, which can be rotated 90° and placed over the first row for vertical headers.

If somebody can use it, maybe as a starting point for a more complete treatment, here it is:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/co4zvs74guh5y5n/vertical_headers.scpt

Jeff

Such a shame that it's 2014, and Numbers STILL has no text rotation. So basic for folks that use spreadsheets often. Open Office works quite well with this.

Numbers STILL has no text rotation.

For the benefit of later visitors to this thread, this categorical statement of course is not *entirely* true. Numbers has plenty of decent formatting options, including ways to rotate text, such as those described above... And it's not clear how well OpenOffice text rotation works in synced documents on a tablet or in the cloud--maybe not so well, maybe not at all.

SG

Of course a text object can be rotated. But not text in a cell. How long have other Spreadsheet programs offered this? I mostly use Numbers, but if I must have vertical (or even 45° text ) in a cell, one must go elsewhere. The lack of vertical text within a cell is a sorely lacking feature in Numbers.

Being able to rotate text in cells is nice when it's needed. I use it myself in Excel.

But you do have a way to rotate text in Numbers that's not that hard. If that doesn't do the job for you, perhaps you could consider giving feedback to Apple via Numbers > Provide Numbers Feedback in your menu. We're just fellow users here.

SG

Yes, I have given input in the past, and will repeat it again today. The specific topic is text rotation WITHIN a cell, not workaround :-)

Thanks,

Don

text rotation WITHIN a cell, not workaround :-)

I tend to be a little more pragmatic. If I can get that text rotated without too much trouble, within a cell or outside, and the end result looks the same, then I figure, what's the difference? I've found from experience that text rotation within a cell can take lots of fiddling to made to look just right, too. Rotation within cells is particularly helpful to me when I want, say, a 45-degree angle for lots of column labels. But for vertical rotation, either method seems pretty much the same amount of work to me. Anyway, it will be interesting to see if Apple addresses this issue.

SG