Hands on: Turning the tables

Anyone who uses Word a great deal will be familiar with the perennial problem of getting a page in a Word document that has the normal header and footer, but consists of a table or chart laid out sideways.

If you insert section breaks and make that page landscape, you’ll find that the header and footer will also move, spoiling the consistency of the document.

The simple solution is, don’t do it. Simply make the table smaller, or split it over a two-page spread.

However, in the world of business and technical reports, using the full size of the paper can make sense with objects that are wider than they are tall. You can either get more information on the page or make the same information more legible.

One solution is to incorporate a page in the document that is blank apart from a header and footer. Print the entire document, then print the landscape page (without a header or footer) onto the blank sheet.

A more sophisticated approach is to treat the item as a graphic. Create this in a separate document, copy it to the clipboard, switch to the main document then Paste Special, Enhanced Metafile.

You’ll end up with a picture of the object, which you can then resize and rotate as any other graphic. Obviously, you won’t be able to edit the text without going back to the source document, then repeating the copy and paste.

Heads and feet
Purists probably won’t like either of these approaches, so we’ll look next at attacking the headers and footers themselves. Let’s assume you’ve already created your landscape page by inserting section breaks before and at the end of the page, then setting the orientation for the section as landscape.

Make sure you swap the top/bottom and side margins so that the print area corresponds to that of the portrait pages.

Now go to View, Header and Footer and put some suitable text in the header, and a page number in the footer of the first page.

In the Header and Footer toolbar, click the Show Next button, which will take you to the header or footer of the next section – your landscape page.

Turn off the ‘Same as previous’ option by clicking its button on the Headers and Footers toolbar. At this stage you should still see the header and page number as you set it on the first page. Select and cut the text of the header.

Now with the header still active, insert a text box – either from the Insert menu or the Drawing toolbar. Don’t worry too much about size and position at this stage, just paste the text cut from the header into the box.

Right-click the box and Format Text Box. On the Colours and Lines tab, select No fill and No line from the respective colour lists.

On the Layout tab, choose ‘In front of text’. Close the dialogue, and with the text box still selected, change the text direction (either from the Format menu or the Text Box toolbar) to suit. You can then drag and size the text box accordingly.

Even when dragged out of the header area the text box will still be logically contained in the header – it’s a trick we’ve seen before and used to get watermarks in earlier versions of Word.

A similar process of turning off the ‘Same as previous’ in the footer, deleting the page number then creating a page number in a text box takes care of the footer.

Finally, you need to go to the next header and footer – ie, the start of the next portrait section. Turn off the ‘Same as previous’ option, delete the text boxes and set the header and footer to match the first section.

Unless you are very lucky, or very skilled, you’ll probably find you need to experiment to get the text boxes in the right place. Also bear in mind which way you are rotating the page, so everything is the right way up.

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