If you have a shape with text in it, the Character and Paragraph content panels of the sidebar work on the internal text, but the Paragraph content panel is missing the 3 vertical alignment buttons, which only appear when you are in text edit mode, though the 4 horizontal alignment buttons are visible in non-edit mode and work.
Maxim Monastirsky committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=04146e07e073ec398eec7869e1571cb65f9926ea tdf#98095 sidebar: Show vertical alignment buttons for shapes It will be available in 5.2.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.