Vertical Text In A Text Box

First of all, you’ll need your text in a text box. To insert a text box in your document, go to the Insert tab and click Text Box (in the Text group). When the Text Box gallery opens, choose the text box style you want. Most people will find that the Simple Text Box (the first option) suffices but go ahead and knock yourself out.

When the text box has been inserted in the document, you can start typing in it.

Click to enlarge

As the image above shows, when the text box is selected, the Drawing Tools tab is displayed in the ribbon. This is just what we need: go to the Format tab and click Text Direction (in the Text group). Choose the direction that suits you.

For vertical text you will need either the Rotate all text 90 degrees or the Rotate all text 270 degrees option. One has the text direction facing downwards and the other upwards.

Now this is really weird: when you place the cursor in your vertical text, it changes to a horizontal cursor. And when you type, the text continues in your new chosen direction. How strange.

Vertical Text In A Table Cell

Another way to get vertical text is to type it into a table cell. While the table is selected (simply having the cursor in a table cell selects the table), you’ll see the Table Tools tab displayed in the ribbon. Go to the Layout tab within. In the Alignment group, you should see the Text Direction command. If you click repeatedly on that button, the orientation of the text in the selected cell will cycle through horizontal – 90 degrees – 270 degrees.

It’s an easy job to remove table borders in your Word document.

First of all select your table: place the cursor in a table cell and then click the Layout tab (in the Table Tools contextual tab)> Next, click Select > Select Table.

Now that the entire table is selected, we can remove its boders. Click to the Design tab and click the down arrow to the right of the Borders button, in the Table Styles group. Make sure you click the down arrow and not the body of the button: clicking the main button area simply removes or adds the last border element used by this button. Word displays the last border element used on the button itself, so that’s helpful.

When you click the Borders down arrow, select the No Border option.

Voila – no borders. Don’t forget to select the table befor removing its borders. If you only put the cursor into a table cell and then remove borders, they are removed from that cell only. The rest of the table will keep its borders.

Imagine that we have a table full of text and that we want to keep the text but get rid of the table. We could just copy the text out of the table and paste it into a program like notepad, before copying it back to our document once the table has been deleted. The problem with doing this, however, is that we will lose any formatting that has been applied to the text. If the document was created by someone else, who knows what weird formatting they applied!

Fortunately for us, there happens to be a magic solution in Microsoft Word that we can use.

Select the table in your document and you should see the Table Tools contextual tab appear with the Design and Layout tabs within.

You can select the table simply by placing the cursor inside one of the cells.

Now click to the Layout tab within the Table Tools tab and then click on the Convert to Text button.

The Convert Table to Text window will display, giving us choices about how we want to separate the text in each cell. The best choice is often Paragraph marks, as shown in the image below, but you will have to decide what’s best for your unique situation.

Taking the Paragraph marks option will display each table cell’s text as a new paragraph.