 You know how you have to turn your head to the side in order to view some of
the emoticons in email. Like :-) is a smile (turn your head to the
left to see it) or how about a wink and smile by using a semi colon, instead,
like this ;-).
I help support a lot of Word user groups. One of the common questions is whether
you can type upside down text in Word.
The quick answer is yes. You can use Word Art to create text as an image, which
can then be rotated upside down. Sure that works. But you need to modify the
artsy text quite a bit to make it look like real text. And doing so can be somewhat
tricky!
But, if you remember those emoticons and how you had to turn your head to the
side to view them...maybe you can think of a cooler solution for working with
text in a different orientation than the way you'd normally look at a page.
In Word you can type text in three ways...left to right, down to up and up
to down. And if you get some East Asian versions of Word, you can even type
from right to left. But upside down has always been a challenge Word wasn't
ready to take.
Who says you have to type from the top of the page to the bottom?
Not me!
What if you typed sideways?
If you take a Word doc, add in a TextBox or two, you can reorient the text
to appear as if some of it is typed normally and some is typed upside
down. You just have to get a little creative.
Open a document. Click File > Page Setup > Margins and
set the page orientation to Landscape, as I've done in the image below.
Now turn on your Drawing toolbar by clicking View
> Toolbars > Drawing. On the Drawing toolbar, you'll find the
TextBox. Draw out two textboxes. As you can see in the image
below, you can use the ruler above the page to check the sizing.
Also remember, you need only right click the TextBox to Format
it, so that they measure out perfectly to the sizes you need. And while you're
in there, remember to turn off any shading inside the box and kill the borders
around the box; unless, of course, you want them there.
When you click on one of the textboxes, you'll notice that the TextBox toolbar
appears. If it doesn't appear automatically, click View > Toolbars
> TextBox. Notice that there is an icon on that toolbar that allows
you to change the text direction!
Just type your text and when finished, select all the text in that textbox
and flip the text orientation to a different direction.
As you can see in the image above, I have some text going one way and the text
in the second box is going the other way...or upside down...as compared to the
rest of the document.
With a little more creativity, you can make some nice greeting cards. Just
think of one page as the front and back and the second page as the inside. Then
print one page, flip the printed page around and reinsert it into your printer
to print the other side.
See...it's not that you can't type text upside down in Word. You can.
You just have to think outside the box. Or rather, in this case,
inside the box!
Oh, and don't forget to turn your head sideways.
Need further help getting your complex Word docs formatted? Join our free
Word Doc Design support group! See this link for details: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Word_DocDesign/ .
|
