Formatting text sideways in a vertical column of a Pages table


[Edited by Moderator]

Original Title: How do you format text within a pages created table with a vertical column so the text reads sideways and not up and down

iMac 21.5″ 4K, macOS 13.7

Posted on Sep 7, 2025 7:11 PM

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Posted on Sep 8, 2025 2:29 AM

Pages is not a Word clone and does not feature text rotation in a table cell. Never has.


Too bad you went to all of this table elaboration to discover that limitation. You can do this in Microsoft Word (e.g. 16.100.3), LibreOffice Writer (e.g. 25.8.1), or other modern Word clone. Should you re-import one of these Word documents where you have rotated text in a table cell, Pages will remove that feature since it is not implemented.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Sep 8, 2025 2:29 AM in response to ElkeBrown

Pages is not a Word clone and does not feature text rotation in a table cell. Never has.


Too bad you went to all of this table elaboration to discover that limitation. You can do this in Microsoft Word (e.g. 16.100.3), LibreOffice Writer (e.g. 25.8.1), or other modern Word clone. Should you re-import one of these Word documents where you have rotated text in a table cell, Pages will remove that feature since it is not implemented.

Sep 8, 2025 3:38 AM in response to ElkeBrown

Hi ElkeBrown,


A long discussion about how to rotate Text Boxes and align them over table cells:

Rotate cell contents in Numbers


Another long discussion about how to rotate Text boxes, take screen shots of them and insert as Image Fill in table cells.

Rotate cells image fill discussion


After you have struggled through those posts in Apple Support Commumities (and you are still interested) please call back here with questions.


Regards,

Ian.

Sep 8, 2025 9:42 AM in response to Yellowbox

Probably either approach that you suggest will suffice if the final document format remains Pages or exported to PDF.


In a mixed platform environment (e.g. Windows Word users), this may lead to document incompatibility and animosity when exported to Word and those parenthetical users open the document. One cannot trust Apple's Quick Look of the exported Word document to display how the document will look when opened in Word, or even LibreOffice Writer.

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Formatting text sideways in a vertical column of a Pages table

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