Keeping a Picture Title with the Picture

Denis has a document that uses landscape orientation. He inserted a picture in the document and, following the picture, added the title for the picture. The title line was separated from the picture by one blank line and the title line was followed by one blank line. To ensure that the picture occupied as much of the page as possible without exceeding the page margins, Denis increased the picture size, in Word, until the final blank line disappeared from the page, and then he saved the file. (The final blank line overflowed onto the next page.)

When Denis reopened the file, the title curiously appeared on the following page rather than following the picture, as desired. When he repeated the sizing operation, although he can reduce the size of the picture by as much as fifty percent or more, he cannot get the title to move back to the same page as the picture.

It is most likely that this problem is caused by paragraph formatting. In order to see what is happening in Word, you'll want to turn on non-printing characters so you can see where the actual paragraph breaks are. (You turn on the display of non-printing characters by clicking the Show/Hide tool on the toolbar. When you do, you should see a backwards P character appear at the end of each paragraph. These don't print; they are purely for information.)

With the non-printing characters displayed and based on the description of the problem, you should see only two of the backwards P characters—one to the right of your picture and one to the right of your picture title. If you see any addition backwards P characters, delete them. This action, alone, may solve the problem.

If it does not solve the problem, then perform the following steps:

1. Press Ctrl+A. This selects the entire document.
2. Choose Paragraph from the Format menu. Word displays the Paragraph dialog box.
3. Make sure the Line and Page Breaks tab is displayed. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Line and Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog box.

4. Make sure the Keep Lines Together check box is selected.
5. Make sure the Keep with Next check box is not selected.
6. Make sure the Page Break Before check box is not selected.
7. Click OK.

Your picture and picture title should now stay together, on the same page.

You may also want to consider modifying how you group your pictures and titles together. Some people find it handy to create a text box and size the text box so that it is as large as you want your picture to be. Then, insert the picture into the text box, press Enter once, and type your picture title. The picture and the title are, in this way, contained within a single text box. The benefit is that the text box is treated as a single unit by Word, allowing you to ensure that it remains on a single page.

Finally, you could always load your picture into a graphics program and add your title within that program. In this way the title because a part of the image itself, and you wouldn't need to worry about trying to add the title within Word.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (9716) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Keeping a Picture Title with the Picture.