How to Rotate a Table in Word – Easy methods

Microsoft word is a word processing tool that allows you format your content. Over the years Microsoft have evolved from just manipulating text to organizing the text in the form of tables and more. Tables feature of word is used by almost all its users. And if you are new to word you will find difficulty in rotating the table in your word document as doing it is not easy. If you are finding the same difficulty then here is the solution to your problem.

Let us see how to rotate a table in word in a detailed guide below and most importantly in a most easy way. We will discuss methods to rotate table in word.

Introduction:

MS Word was launched by Microsoft Corporation on October 25, 1983. It is used as word processor that means it is used to edit text based documents. Over the years Microsoft have brought major updates to MS word and it is one of the favourite tools of many students and people who work on text based documents.

MS word provides many features that help you optimize the text like font, color, style, etc.MS Word has inbuilt spell checker to help write users with correct spellings. One of the best features of MS Word is tables. Tables allow you to organize and sort your data however you like.

MS Word provides different templates for creating brochures, letters, newsletters, notes articles etc. It is mostly used by students to edit their Assignments.

What is a Table in MS Word:

Table in MS Word not different  from regular tables that are a grid of small cells that act as rows and columns. People use table to organize their text, numerical data, etc. in order to sort them according to their needs.

We can apply different formatting like changing the text font, size, color etc. options on the content inside the table. We can delete, add, cells in the table. Table menu in word allows you to merge two cells.

When we insert our data inside the table it auto formats the data however we can modify it according to our requirements.

How to create a table in word

1  Go to MS Word in your computer

2  In the ribbon go to Insert and click on Table and then click on insert table

3  Select the number of rows and columns and then click on OK

4  A table will be generated according the number of rows and columns you entered

5  Start filling the cells with data and apply different formatting features


How to rotate a table in MS Word

Microsoft does not provide you normal options to rotate the table in your Word document. However, we can different methods to rotate table in MS word. The methods include changing the text orientation, using Excel and converting the table as image to rotate the table. Let us see how to apply this methods to get our work done.

Method 1:

As we all know MS word does not allow to rotate the table in the document straightway. However, we can do it by changing the text orientation this will rotate the table. We can change the text orientation only to 90° and 270° and you don’t need to specify angle it automatically shows yo the available orientation angles. MS word does not allow users to change the text orientation other than 90° and 270° so we cannot rotate the table to other angles other than these. To do it perform these steps

step 1: Open MS Word on your computer

step 2: Select the table you want to rotate

step 3: Go to ribbon at the top and click on Layout. Note that there are two Layout in the ribbon. Click on the Layout that is under table tools after the help menu and not the Layout before the references menu.

selected table in word document and highlighted layout option in ribbon
select the table you want to rotate and click on layout.

step 4: In Layout search for Text Direction in the top right corner and click on the Text Direction to change the orientation. Click it multiple times to go through all the available orientations.

Highlighted Text direction explaining how to rotate table
click on text direction multiple times to go through all the orientation.

Method 2:

Another thing we can try to rotate our table is by converting our table to image. But there is one drawback to this method and it is that we will not be able to edit in our table after we convert it to image. So if you want to edit the data in your table after you convert it to image you’ll have to  first convert it to text. There are many free websites available on the internet that convert text to Image for free.

The advantage of this method is that you can rotate it to whatever angles you want. There is no restriction to how much you can rotate your table. To perform this method follow these steps:

step 1: Go to the MS word in your PC/Computer and select the table  you want to rotate and copy it.

step 2: Go to some other place in your document, right click on the screen and select paste as picture

image of word document explaining how to paste as picture
right click and select paste as picture option

step 3: Delete the table from its place and paste the table which you converted as image to that place

step 4: Now click on the rotate arrow and rotate your table to whatever angle you want to.

image of a word document explaining how to rotate a table after pasting it as a picture
click on the rotate arrow and rotate the table.

Method 3:

In this method we will make use of Microsoft Excel. It is best if you want to make your columns your rows or in technical term rotate your table to transpose. Follow the below steps to rotate your table using this method

step 1: Open the document in word whose table you want to rotate and copy the table from the word

step 2: Go to Microsoft Excel, open a a new sheet and paste your table in that. And again select and copy it.

step 3: Now right click on an empty cell and click on the Transpose icon to paste it to Transpose.

image showing how to rotate table using MS Excel
right click and select the paste as Transpose icon.

step 4: If you don’t find paste to Transpose icon then right click on an empty cell and go to paste special and in that drag over the paste icons to see the paste options in that click on Transpose

image explaining how to paste as Transpose in Excel to rotate the selected table


step 5: Select and copy the new table and paste it on the word document.

All the methods will help you rotate you table in MS Word however, if you are trying to rotate just because your table has many columns and the document page width is too short for your table then you can try changing the orientation of your page from Potrait to Landscape. To do it just follow these steps

1: Go to the page in your Word document that contains the table

2: On the ribbon above Go to Layout

3: In that search for orientation and click on it and select Landscape.

image explaining how to rotate document page in Word


4: This will rotate the whole page to landscape and you’ll have enough space for you r table columns

Conclusion:

In the above article, we have explained different methods ( Text direction, pasting table as image, and using excel) to rotate a table in word. If you are having difficulties in rotating a table in Word please go through the above article for solution.

 

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