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When you use Word, you might occasionally find that you need control over your text layout beyond setting margins, formatting paragraphs, and creating columns. At those times, you might benefit from entering your information into shapes that can contain text, such as AutoShapes that can serve as text containers or text boxes. Text boxes are free-floating objects, independent of your regular document, that you can use to enclose information. You can then format these objects in the same ways you format drawings (by using the Drawing toolbar).
For more information about working with AutoShapes and the Drawing toolbar, see Chapter 16, "Enlivening Documents with Drawings and AutoShapes."
In Word, you can use two main types of text boxes: standard text boxes and AutoShapes formatted to serve as text containers. Generally, you'll want to use text boxes and AutoShapes when you want to position several blocks of text on a page or flow a continuing story from one area in your document to another. For example, you might be creating a newsletter in which a story starts on the cover page but concludes on another page, later in the newsletter.
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In addition to creating interesting page layouts and continuing a story from one text block to another, you might also want to use text boxes to accomplish the following tasks:
This section describes how you can manipulate and control text using text boxes—both standard rectangular text boxes and AutoShapes formatted as text containers. Keep in mind that when you're working with text boxes and AutoShapes, you must work in Print Layout view. In Print Layout view, the text boxes and AutoShapes are displayed on screen as you work. Figure 23-1 shows a Print Layout view of a text box and an AutoShape formatted to contain text.
Figure 23-1. You can control text placement and generate unique page designs using text boxes and AutoShapes.
As you can see, the active text box is displayed surrounded by a frame-like border. This border appears whenever you click a text box, and it serves a number of purposes, including enabling you to move and resize the text box as well as access text box properties.
Creating a text box is as easy as drawing a box or shape on the drawing canvas. You can create a text box by performing any of the following actions:
For more information about creating AutoShapes, see Chapter 16, "Enlivening Documents with Drawings and AutoShapes."
By default, when you draw a text box or an AutoShape, a drawing canvas appears. You can work with a text box on the drawing canvas, or you can drag the text box off the drawing canvas and then delete the canvas. (To delete the drawing canvas, select it, and press Delete.) If you prefer to avoid placing text boxes and AutoShapes on the drawing canvas in the first place, you can turn off the drawing canvas's default action by configuring the Options dialog box, as follows:
After you close the Options dialog box, the drawing canvas will not appear when you create text boxes and drawings.
Regardless of whether you work on or off the drawing canvas, you'll notice that the Text Box toolbar opens automatically after you create a text box. (See Figure 23-1.) This toolbar is displayed whenever a text box is selected. When no text boxes are selected, the Text Box toolbar is hidden. To redisplay the toolbar, simply click a text box in your document.
Tip - Redisplay the Text Box toolbar
By default, the Text Box toolbar appears when you select a text box and disappears when the text box is no longer selected. If you manually close the Text Box toolbar while you're working by clicking its Close button, the toolbar won't appear automatically when you click text boxes. To redisplay the Text Box toolbar after you close it, you need to click a text box and then choose View, Toolbars, Text Box. The Text Box option appears on the Toolbars menu only when you've selected a text box within your document.
As you create text boxes in your document, you can move and resize the text boxes in the same manner you move and resize drawing objects—by dragging them by their borders. To move a text box, click anywhere on its border other than a sizing handle, and then drag the text box. To resize a text box, you can drag the sizing handles (which appear as circles in text box frames) to change the text box's width and height. (Figure 23-1 shows a selected text box along with its border and sizing handles.)
After you create text boxes, you are ready to add text and formatting. You can insert text into text boxes in a few predictable ways, including the following:
If you're planning to insert a longer story into a text box, you should consider typing and editing the story in a plain Word document before importing the information into a text box. That way, you can conduct most of your editing, formatting, and fine-tuning tasks in a standard document, which generally provides a larger viewing area.
Tip - Format text in text boxes
You can format text in text boxes in the same manner you format document text. First click in the text box, and then format the text using keyboard shortcuts, Formatting toolbar buttons, Font and Paragraph dialog boxes, and the Styles And Formatting task pane.
In addition to inserting text, you can insert graphics, tables, and some fields into text boxes. Among the items that you can't include in text boxes are the following:
To be able to include these elements in a text container, you'll have to convert your text box to a floating frame, as described in the next section, or you'll need to use a framed document, as discussed in the section "Adding Frames When Designing Online Documents".
Note
Generally, your best bet when it comes to placing text in text containers is to use text boxes and AutoShapes, because they are highly customizable. But if you need to insert text that contains comments, footnotes, endnotes, tables, or certain fields (such as table of contents and index fields) in a text container, you'll have to use a floating frame instead of a text box, because text boxes can't properly support these types of elements. A floating frame looks like a text box, but you can't format it as extensively as a text box and it supports Word fields.
You can easily convert an existing text box to a floating frame whenever necessary by following these steps:
After you convert a text box to a frame, the Text Box toolbar and some Drawing toolbar buttons, such as the Fill Color and Line Color buttons, will be unavailable.
By default, when you create a text box, it appears as a white (not transparent) box surrounded by thin (0.75 point) black lines. Fortunately, text boxes don't have to be limited to plain white rectangles strategically placed around your document. You can format text boxes and AutoShape text containers in the same manner you format other drawing objects. For example, you can apply fill and line colors by using the Fill Color and Line Color buttons on the Drawing toolbar, or you can add a shadow to a text box by using the Shadow Style button. To format text boxes and AutoShapes using the Drawing toolbar, select the text box or AutoShape, and then click the appropriate Drawing toolbar button.
In addition to the standard formatting buttons available on the Drawing toolbar, you can format text boxes using the Format Text Box dialog box. Namely, you can control the position of text within text boxes and AutoShapes, you can change a text box's shape, and you can instruct Word to automatically resize a text box or an AutoShape to accommodate a story's complete text. For more information about using the Drawing toolbar buttons to format drawing objects, see Chapter 16, "Enlivening Documents with Drawings and AutoShapes."
You can control how close or far away text is placed relative to a text box or an AutoShape's edges. You do this by changing the text box's internal margin settings, as described here:
Figure 23-2. You can control the spacing around text placed in text boxes and AutoShapes by configuring the internal margin settings on the Text Box tab.
In addition to controlling internal margins, you can change the direction of text within text boxes. To do so, click in a text box, and click the Change Text Direction button on the Text Box toolbar. You can continue to click the button to cycle through the available text direction options: down, up, and standard.
Caution
The beauty of using AutoShapes is that you can change your mind regarding which AutoShape you want to use at any time, even if the AutoShape is formatted as a text box. Changing the shape of a text box or an AutoShape is similar to changing shapes that don't contain text. To do so, ensure that you're working in Print Layout view, and then follow these basic steps:
All selected shapes take on the new shape but retain all other format settings, such as color, internal margins, and so forth.
You can automatically resize a text box or an AutoShape that contains text so that it is as long or as short as necessary to display all the text inserted in it. You can use this option only with nonlinked (stand-alone) text boxes because linked text boxes are designed to flow text to the next linked text box if text is longer than the current text box's boundaries. To automatically size a nonlinked text container to accommodate inserted text, follow these steps:
The text container will automatically stretch or shrink to accommodate the text.
If you've ever created a newsletter or a brochure, you know how tricky it can be to properly fill text areas and manage jumps from one page to another. In Word, you can simplify these types of tasks by linking text boxes. When you link text boxes, you indicate that any text you insert into one text box will automatically flow into the next text box when the first text box cannot fit all of the inserted text. After you insert text into linked text boxes, you can edit the text to make your story longer or shorter, and Word will automatically reflow the text throughout the series of linked text boxes.
Note
When you want to link text boxes or AutoShapes, you need to keep the following limitations in mind:
Before you flow text into a series of linked text boxes, you should be sure that you've made most of your changes to your text. Then draw the text boxes you want to link and import your story into. When your text is ready and your text boxes are drawn, follow these steps to link the text boxes and insert the text:
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Inside Out
After you link text boxes, you can easily jump from one text box to another by using the Text Box toolbar. To do so, select a text box that's part of a linked series of text boxes. Then, on the Text Box toolbar, click the Next Text Box button to move to the next linked text box, or click the Previous Text Box button to jump to the previous text box. You can also move to the next text box by positioning your insertion point at the end of text in a text box and pressing the Right Arrow key, or you can jump to the preceding text box by positioning your insertion point at the beginning of the text in a text box and pressing the Left Arrow key.
You can copy or move a story (including text boxes and their contents) to another document or location in the same document. To accomplish this, you must select all the linked text boxes in a story if the story consists of multiple linked text boxes. If you copy just some of the text boxes in a story, you'll copy the text boxes but not the text inside the text boxes. If your story is contained in a single text box, Word automatically includes the content when you copy the text box.
To copy or move an entire story that's contained in a single text box or a series of linked text boxes, follow these steps:
To copy or move text that appears within a text box without copying or moving the text box, select just the text, and then copy or move it in the same manner you normally copy or move text in Word documents. Unfortunately, you can't select and copy all the text in a linked story at once—instead, you have to select and copy the text in each text box one at a time.
Inside Out
You can break links between text boxes just as easily as you create them. When you break a link, you remove only the link between the selected text box and the text box that follows it in the series—you don't remove all the links throughout a linked series. Essentially, when you break a link, you divide a story into two series of linked text boxes. By default, the first series of linked text boxes contains the story, and the second series of linked text boxes are emptied.
To break a link between text boxes, follow these steps:
At this point, text will stop flowing in the last text box before the broken link, and the second series of linked text boxes will be empty. If the text doesn't fit in the first series of linked text boxes after you break a link, you can create and link additional text boxes or enlarge existing text boxes to provide enough room to display the text.
Tip - Eliminate a text box in the middle of a story
You can cut a text box in the middle of a linked series of text boxes without deleting any parts of your story. To do so, simply right-click a text box's border, and choose Cut on the shortcut menu. When you cut a linked text box, the story readjusts and flows the text into the next text box.
To delete a text box, you simply select a text box and press Delete. Performing this action on a nonlinked text box deletes both the text box and its contents. In contrast, when you delete a text box that's part of a linked series of text boxes, the text from the deleted text box automatically flows into the remaining linked text boxes. If the remaining text boxes aren't large enough to properly display the story in its entirety, you'll have to resize the remaining text boxes, create additional text boxes, or edit your story to fit in the existing text boxes. Keep in mind that Word doesn't notify you when text overflows the final text box's boundaries, so you should always be extradiligent about checking the flow of stories and making sure that no text is hidden.
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