rotate: Rotate cell text

In flextable: Functions for Tabular Reporting

Rotate cell text

Description

It can be useful to change the text direction when table headers are large. For example, header labels can be rendered as "tbrl" (top to bottom and right to left), corresponding to a 90-degree rotation, or "btlr", corresponding to a 270-degree rotation. This function changes cell text direction. By default, it is "lrtb", which means from left to right and top to bottom.

'Word' and 'PowerPoint' do not handle automatic height with rotated headers. Therefore, you need to set header heights (with the height() function) and set the rule to "exact" for row heights (with the hrule() function); otherwise, Word and PowerPoint outputs will have insufficient height to properly display the text.

flextable does not rotate text by arbitrary angles. It only rotates by right angles (90-degree increments). This choice ensures consistent rendering across 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, see flextable-package to learn how to create 'flextable' object.
i	row selector, see section Row selection with the i parameter in <Selectors in flextable>.
j	column selector, see section Column selection with the j parameter in <Selectors in flextable>.
rotation	one of "lrtb", "tbrl", "btlr".
align	vertical alignment of paragraph within cell, one of "center" or "top" or "bottom".
part	part selector, see section Part selection with the part parameter in <Selectors in flextable>. Value 'all' can be used.

Details

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

See Also

Other formatting shortcuts: align(), bg(), bold(), color(), empty_blanks(), font(), fontsize(), highlight(), italic(), keep_with_next(), line_spacing(), padding(), style(), 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

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

flextable documentation built on June 2, 2026, 9:08 a.m.