How to Change PowerPoint Text Direction

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In this article you will find 2 different ways to change the direction of a text box in PowerPoint to design your slides better.

Text is not always written horizontally on a slide. Sometimes you may need to rotate your text to suit the nature of graphics on your slide. For example, take a look at the following:

Rotated powerPoint Text on Chart — Source: PowerPoint CEO Pack 2

There are two ways to rotate the angle of your text. One way is to rotate the text box and the other way is to rotate just the text. In this article, we will explore both the ways.

Rotating the text box:

This is the most common way to rotate the text. Click on the text box you want to rotate. A circular handle appears at the top edge of the text box. You can use the handle to rotate the text box.

If you want to control the angle of rotation precisely, you can click on the ‘Format’ tab in the PowerPoint ribbon (Make sure that the text box is selected). Go to the ‘Size’ group and click on the drop down menu. Now, you can change the angle of rotation in the pane that opens up:

Rotating just the text:

Sometimes you don’t need to rotate the text box. You can rotate just the text. Let us say, you want to label the vertical axes of a chart. Take a look at the following examples:

Alternatively you may need to label a shape that is oriented vertically. For example, take a look at the label ‘Newly Added’ in the following column chart:

Column Chart with Stacked Text

In such cases, you can use ‘Change Text Direction’ option in PowerPoint. You can find the option in the ‘Paragraph’ group in the ‘Home’ tab of PowerPoint ribbon.

You have the options to rotate your text to 90⁰ or 270⁰. You can also have your text stacked vertically as you saw in the ‘Newly Added’ label in the chart above.

Quick Tip:

When you use ‘Stacked vertically’ option, make sure that the space between the letters is ‘Very tight’. You can use ‘Character Spacing’ option in the ‘Font’ group in ‘Home’ tab.

Thus, you have learned 2 different ways in which to change the PowerPoint text direction and make your slides more interesting.

Here are 2 examples of how you can use these rotated text in your slide design:

Text in Matrix Charts

Labels for your diagrams

Quick Note: Using appropriate angle for your text is one way to impress your audience. Another way to impress them is to use high quality graphics and diagrams for your business slides. However, it takes a lot of time to create high quality graphics and diagrams from scratch.

That is why we came up with our PowerPoint graphics and Charts CEO Pack Bundle for busy business presenters like you. All the templates are fully editable. Just choose the template that matches your thought and replace the sample text with your own text.