Rotating Pictures

Word includes a variety of different controls on the Drawing toolbar that allow you to perform many different tasks with graphics in your documents. Unfortunately, rotating pictures is not one of the tasks you can do. When WordTips readers were queried about how to accomplish this task, almost uniformly they indicated that 'you can't get there from here' (or something to that effect). It is best to just plan on rotating your pictures before you insert them in your documents. For instance, use a graphics program such as Paint Shop Pro to rotate the graphic, save it to a file or the Clipboard, and then insert it in Word.

For some graphics that you insert as pictures (such as some clipart pictures), there is another option. You can choose to ungroup the elements of the picture, then perform a rotate. Remember, however, that Word is not a graphics program--your results may not be to your liking, and you are then left with only the option to return to the first solution of rotating your graphics in a different program. This approach will only work with compound pictures, such as clipart. It won't work with regular pictures that you might scan or import from a digital camera. (Word cannot rotate bitmapped graphics, such as BMP or JPG files.)