Rotate cell text

It can be useful to be able to change the direction, when the table headers are huge for example, header labels can be rendered as "tbrl" (top to bottom and right to left) corresponding to a 90 degrees rotation or "btlr" corresponding to a 270 degrees rotation. The function change cell text direction. By default, it is "lrtb" which mean from left to right and top to bottom.

'Word' and 'PowerPoint' don't handle auto height with rotated headers. So you need to set header heights (with function height()) and set rule "exact" for rows heights (with function hrule()) otherwise Word and PowerPoint outputs will have small height not corresponding to the necessary height to display the text.

flextable doesn't do the rotation by any angle. It only rotates by a number of right angles. This choice is made to ensure the same rendering between Word, PowerPoint (limited to angles 0, 270 and 90) HTML and PDF.

Usage

rotate(x, i = NULL, j = NULL, rotation, align = NULL, part = "body")

Arguments

x

a flextable object

i

rows selection

j

columns selection

rotation

one of "lrtb", "tbrl", "btlr".

align

vertical alignment of paragraph within cell, one of "center" or "top" or "bottom".

part

partname of the table (one of 'all', 'body', 'header', 'footer')

Details

When function autofit is used, the rotation will be ignored. In that case, use dim_pretty and width instead of autofit.

See also

Other sugar functions for table style: align(), bg(), bold(), color(), empty_blanks(), font(), fontsize(), highlight(), italic(), keep_with_next(), line_spacing(), padding(), tab_settings(), valign()

Examples

library(flextable)

ft_1 <- flextable(head(iris))

ft_1 <- rotate(ft_1, j = 1:4, align = "bottom", rotation = "tbrl", part = "header")
ft_1 <- rotate(ft_1, j = 5, align = "bottom", rotation = "btlr", part = "header")

# if output is docx or pptx, think about (1) set header heights
# and (2) set rule "exact" for rows heights because Word
# and PowerPoint don't handle auto height with rotated headers
ft_1 <- height(ft_1, height = 1.2, part = "header")
ft_1 <- hrule(ft_1, i = 1, rule = "exact", part = "header")

ft_1
Sepal.Length
Sepal.Width
Petal.Length
Petal.Width
Species
5.1
3.5
1.4
0.2
setosa
4.9
3.0
1.4
0.2
setosa
4.7
3.2
1.3
0.2
setosa
4.6
3.1
1.5
0.2
setosa
5.0
3.6
1.4
0.2
setosa
5.4
3.9
1.7
0.4
setosa

dat <- data.frame(
  a = c("left-top", "left-middle", "left-bottom"),
  b = c("center-top", "center-middle", "center-bottom"),
  c = c("right-top", "right-middle", "right-bottom")
)

ft_2 <- flextable(dat)
ft_2 <- theme_box(ft_2)
ft_2 <- height_all(x = ft_2, height = 1.3, part = "body")
ft_2 <- hrule(ft_2, rule = "exact")
ft_2 <- rotate(ft_2, rotation = "tbrl")
ft_2 <- width(ft_2, width = 1.3)

ft_2 <- align(ft_2, j = 1, align = "left")
ft_2 <- align(ft_2, j = 2, align = "center")
ft_2 <- align(ft_2, j = 3, align = "right")

ft_2 <- valign(ft_2, i = 1, valign = "top")
ft_2 <- valign(ft_2, i = 2, valign = "center")
ft_2 <- valign(ft_2, i = 3, valign = "bottom")

ft_2
a
b
c
left-top
center-top
right-top
left-middle
center-middle
right-middle
left-bottom
center-bottom
right-bottom