posted 7/11/2011 by SMcDonald - Views: [1282]
A long time ago, Microsoft added a great feature to their Excel product. It allowed the capabilities to rotate text. Regrettably, this has been a long time waiting for reporting tools such as SQL Server Reporting Services. Another great addition to the SSRS 2008 R2 release gave us this same ability. We can now Rotate text. With that being said, here is a before look at the placement of our text value:
What I want to do is take the text for Fiscal Year and rotate it for Vertical alignment. Here are the steps that I have to take:
1. In Design mode, click on the group that you want to change the alignment for, for me it is the Fiscal Year. Go to the Properties (you can access by F4 or by clicking on View / Properties Window.
2. Looking at the properties window, scroll down to the Localization section. Hit the drop down for Writing Mode and select Rotate 270.
3. Since you are rotating your text, you might want to align the value in the textbox. To do that, you will scroll up in your Properties Window to Aligntment and select the dropdown for Vertical Align, select Middle for my example. At this point you can probably reduce the width of the column now.
I hope everybody enjoyed this quick tip. I’ll make sure I post more of them in the next few weeks!!!
Sherri, Cannot select 'Rotate 270'. Can only choose from Veritcal, Horizontal, Default, or Expression. Do we need to install something or is there a different way? If I choose Vertical the text has to be read from top to bottom (vertical option only does a Rotate 90). Thanks.