Aligning Gridlines at 45 degrees (Orientation)

[DaveL]

I have a spreadsheet where the second row is a listing of attributes. I have
set the orientation (Format-Cells-Alignment) of each column in this row to 45
degrees. The first row is a higher level group of attributes in which each
one contains a group of the attributes in the second row. I have merged the
appropriate number of cells in this first row to reflect that aggregate
grouping of the second row. I want the first line to be horizontal (ie.,
orientation is zero degrees). My problem is getting the grid lines (or is it
the border?) of the columns in the first to be oriented at 45 degree lines so
that the outer boundaries of the cells in the first row align with the 45
degree angle of the gridlines of the second row. Hope I have decribed this
sufficiently.

Any help with this would be appreciated.

Thanks - Dave

[Ron@Buy]

DaveL
I think this problem may be that your cells are rectangular rather than
square. Try increasing the row height such that the cell appears as a square!

[DaveL]

Ron - Thanks - I tried it and not quite sure how that will do it. Maybe I'm
missing something or didn't describe it properly. Is there some way I can
attach a file here to show it? I thought I saw somebody do that in another
thread.

But the text of all the columns in the first row is normal orientation. To
simplify this question, I guess I am looking to see how I get the borders (or
gridlines?) of those cells to be at 45 degree angles (whiile keeping the text
normal horizontal).

[MartinW]

Hi Dave,

You can't change the gridlines, they are fixed.

What you can change is the borders. Have a practice in a
blank sheet. Select a row of 7 or 8 cells, right click on
them and go to Format cells, on the borders tab select
diagonal borders, then click the patterns tab and select
white as the fill color.

You can get different effects by changing the row and column
height and width. Getting any rotated text to just where you
want it requires putting one or two line breaks (Alt+Enter)
before the text and playing with left and right alignment etc.
Some well placed spaces come in handy sometimes too.

It's not a great deal of functionality but you can come up
with some good effects

HTH
Martin

"DaveL" <Da...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:2940A241-6E8A-47E4...@microsoft.com...

[Gord Dibben]

The text in the cells must be aligned to 45 degress in order to get slanted
borders.

You cannot change the orientation of the cell itself, only the text within.

In short............you cannot have row 1 slanted with horizontal text
alignment.

Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On Fri, 18 Apr 2008 11:15:00 -0700, DaveL <Da...@discussions.microsoft.com>
wrote:

[DaveL]

Thanks Gord - I appreciate it. Sounds like I am out of luck on this.

[DaveL]

Thanks Martin - I will play around and see what I can come up with.