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I'm writing my dissertation and I have a particularly large table in the attachment section which stretches over several pages vertically and fits just about right horizontally when in landscape.

The issue is, I cannot have any pages in my dissertation in landscape. The university requires that the header and footer are present at the top and bottom part of all pages, including attachments of this kind. On display, it is top and bottom, but please bear in mind that this monstrosity will need to be printed. Once printed and bound, the section with the huge table in landscape orientation would have the header and footer on the sides as opposed to top and bottom, because the document as a whole is bound in portrait mode.

Guys, do you have any ideas how to achieve landscape table in portrait oriented page, please? I'm at a loss. The only thing I came up with is pasting it as images, but it's hell of a lot of work considering the length of it, plus I wouldn't be able to make changes later.

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  • Potentially a lot of work, but what about redoing the table and changing the text direction to make it work? I know that's not the answer you're looking for, but might be the best way to keep the table editable. Jun 25, 2018 at 9:57
  • @CaptainPhoenix I added an answer with using canvas and a textbox. Would you give me feedback? Dec 23, 2018 at 19:02

2 Answers 2

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You can paste the Table into a Text Box, then rotate the Text Box (answer via Quora):

Though the table will be still editable, while editing a shape that has text inside, Word resets the text temporarily to the default orientation.

Here are the steps:

Create a table. Then select all the table contents using the icon on one of the table corners. Copy the selection.

Create an empty textbox outside the table, right click on the textbox and choose “Add text”.

Paste the table you have copied inside the textbox. Note that the size of the textbox will affect how the table will look like. Unless there’s enough space inside.

Rotate the textbox(which will consequently rotate all its content including the table) using ordinary rotation icon(the green circle).

Rotated table in Word

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  • 1
    If the table's larger than a page you'd need a text box per page. So yes, this works, but not for huge tables like the one mentioned in the question. Jun 25, 2018 at 9:56
  • For the record, this approach would still work for large, multipage tables. Although you'd need to insert multiple text boxes, you can then create links between them so that the content (i.e., the table) automatically flows from one to the next as needed. Unfortunately, if the table is set up to have repeated header rows, those rows will show up only on the first page.
    – cnread
    Dec 23, 2018 at 22:48
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Next solution avoids creating a new sections, which makes it more difficult to change headers, footers, margins, etc. in a consistent manner.

  • Insert a Drawing Canvas (Menu, Insert, Illustration, Shapes, New Drawing Canvas at the bottom of the menu).
  • Insert a Text Box inside the canvas (Menu, Insert, Illustration, Shapes, Basic Shapes, first element: Text Box).
  • Copy the table and the text you want to rotate and paste it inside the textbox, or directly create them inside the Text Box.
  • Select and rotate the Text Box.

In the text flow, a Drawing Canvas works like a figure inserted in a paragraph (and not floating around). You can center the paragraph, add space before or after the paragraph, etc.

If the table does not fit the page, you can decrease the font. You can also play with the margins of the cells of the table.

Of course, you could make a table in Excel and copy it in Word as a figure, and rotate it, but the previous solution has a better resolution to file weight ratio.

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