The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group
The Perfectionist
Ray Beatty
 raybea@melbpc.org.au

The question came up during Random Access at our last monthly meeting: "In MS Word how can you print a page sideways within a document, yet retain headers and footers in portrait orientation like the rest of the document?"

Numerous answers were tossed up, most of which seemed too much like hard work, especially as the member asking the question had about 50 pages to do. Then someone piped up: "Use WordPerfect, that can do it", which immediately ignited the factional divisions within the hall between the two religions of MS Word and WordPerfect - a split which made any other conflict in the world today pale in comparison.

But later I thought about the question because I've had this problem myself. Just how do you get the headers and footers to stay at the top of the page even when you've changed the contents to print sideways? Now I hadn't been able to do that myself before so I thought it would be interesting to sit down and try to work it out.

Well it turned out tricker than I thought. I searched all my manuals and books for reference to what must be a common problem - to no avail. My own efforts got nowhere, so one night I phoned the Big Daddy Help Line: WordPerfect in Utah.

The support guy searched the databases, fiddled with it himself (as I listened to canned on-hold music at umpteen dollars a minute) and he came back with two suggestions.
  • At the top of the rotated page, turn off the current header/footer definitions, create a graphics box, put a new header definition in that, then rotate the box 90 degrees to the side--that is, to the "top" of the sideways page.
  • Or, leave the landscape pages blank, print them out with headers in place, then re-run the job to print the sideways bits.
The first method sounded fine. Only trouble is, in both 5.1 and 6.0 you cannot put a header into a text box. In Six the header/footer option is even dimmed out of the layout menu.

As for the pre-print option, well that was suggested on the night and the questioner pointed out that as he had to produce some 50 documents that was going to be quite a hassle.

So next day I phoned WordPerfect Pacific, to see if our local supporters are any better. Arun, on the Help desk, also hummed and harred and asked to call me back. A couple of hours later he returned with the option which seems to work best:

The Answer

The answer is to rotate the copy, not the header. Here's the recipe--though you'll have to work on it to get it right. Remember especially that landscape text seems to take up more room than it does in portrait format (don't ask me why) so you'll have to fiddle with the quantity on each page. However, once you've got it working, it should be easy enough to run as a macro. This is the method for WPW6, but you should be able to work back and adapt it for WP5.1.
  • Select the copy you want run sideways, save it in a temporary file (e.g. TEMP1).
  • In your document, go to the spot where you want to insert the landscape pages, create a new page (Ctrl-Enter in the WP keyboard). The blank page will still contain your header or footer.
  • At the top of that blank page, select Graphics, Text Box.
  • In the Text Box menu, check the Size options: Full width, Full depth.
  • Then select Content and at the bottom of the dialogue box you'll find four squares for rotation. If you want the top of the page on the left, check the 90 degree square, if on the right, the 270 degrees.
  • Then write in the Filename, OK.
And bingo! you now have a rotated page with headers and footers in their proper place (see Figure 1). But be warned it isn't quite that easy and you'll have to fiddle a while to get it right. But then that's half the fun of doing it, isn't it?

Doug Departs

Last month you may have read in Ash's Editorial column that Alan Ashton, creator of WordPerfect, has finally retired to spend his billions. Well here in Australia we've had our own departure, too. Doug Ruttan set up WordPerfect Pacific as one man with a telephone back in 1987.

In that time he has built the company up to be one of the biggest software companies in the country - and giving by far the best support service in the country. He survived storms and near-catastrophes, like the launch of WP5.0, without losing his quiet Canadian cool, and last year supervised the launch of WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS and then Windows with maximum effect.

I don't know what executive profit sharing schemes WordPerfect have, but I hope that Doug has also left with a few bucks to spend. He deserves it.

Reprinted from the April 1994 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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