Text Boxes

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Text Boxes' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Adding a Drop Shadow to a Text Box
Drop shadows add a nice touch to text boxes, making it seem like they are hovering above the page. Here's the simple steps you need in order to add a drop shadow to your text boxes.

Automatically Adjusting Height for Text Boxes
Text boxes are often used to enhance the layout of documents. You may want a text box that adjusts its height automatically based on the text it contains. Here's how to get just what you want.

Boxes in Boxes
When you insert a text box within another text box, you may expect any text in the outer text box to wrap around the inner text box. Word doesn't work that way, however. Here's why, along with a couple of workarounds you can use.

Centering a Text Box
Different ways you can move a text box to the center of the page.

Changing Defaults for Text Boxes and Callouts
One of the great uses to which you can put Word's AutoText feature is to provide "default" text boxes and callouts. This tip explains why you might want to do that, and how to go about doing it.

Changing Orientation of a Text Box
Do you need to rotate a text box by ninety degrees? Unfortunately you cannot do this in Word, but you can change the apparent orientation of a text box by modifying its size. This tip explains the easiest way to make the change.

Columns in a Text Box
Want to divide a text box into columns? Word doesn't allow you to do this, but there are ways to work around the limitation.

Creating See-through Text Boxes
When laying out your document, you may want to use a text box that appears to be positioned over your text, but to be transparent so you can see what is behind the text box. Here's how to create just that type of element.

Creating Usable Figure Captions
Many people add both images and figure captions within text boxes so they can be easily positioned within a document. Doing so, however, has drawbacks as the figure captions are not as easily accessible for cross referencing or for inclusion in a Table of Figures. This tip describes how you can rectify this situation so that the captions are again usable.

Different Layout for a Portion of a Page
Got a document layout that requires a portion of the page to be in one layout and another portion to be in a different layout? While Word is better at word processing than at document design, there are some things you can do to get the layout to appear the way you want.

Find and Replace in Text Boxes
Find and Replace can work great, but not necessarily for text within text boxes. This tip discusses all the ins and outs of working with text boxes when it comes to finding text within them.

Finding Text Boxes
Need to search for various text boxes in your document? It's easy to do with the handy macro provided in this tip.

Hanging Indents in Wrapped Text
If you use hanging indents for some of your paragraphs, you may wonder why they don't look right when they wrap on the right side of a text box or graphic. Here's the reason and what you can do to correct the formatting.

Including Text Box Text In Word Counts
If you use text boxes in the layout of your documents, you should know that any word counts you perform do not include any words in those text boxes. If you want to include those words in your counts, you need the information in this tip.

Inserting a Text Box
Text boxes are a great way to implement non-standard ways of laying out your document. They allow you to put text at virtually any point on a page, and have it be treated as a graphic element. This tip explains the different ways you can add text boxes to your documents.

No-border Text Boxes by Default
If you don't like the way that the default text boxes are formatted in Word, you can make changes to the text box attributes so they appear the way you want. This tip explains how to do this, along with one caveat about what else is affected by your change.

Repeating the First Column of a Table
Need the first column of a table to be repeated on multiple pages? You can't do it automatically in Word, but you can use a workaround to get the desired result.

Selecting a Graphic Behind a Text Box
How to select a graphic that is obscured by a text box can be perplexing. Here's an overview of the different ways you can select just the graphic and nothing else.

Selecting Text in Linked Text Boxes
Text boxes are often used as design elements in a document layout. If you have linked text boxes, you may have noticed that it isn't as easy to select text where the selection spans the text box boundaries. Here's how you can still make those selections.

Wrapping Text around a Graphic in a Text Box
Word allows you to wrap text around a graphic or around a text box, but it won't allow you to wrap text in a text box around a graphic in a text box. This may seem confusing, but the explanation is quite simple, once you understand how Word deals with objects in a document.