In Word, text boxes can contain many different types of elements and are handy when you need to insert information in a specific place on the page. You can format text boxes in dozens of ways to make them appear just how you need. The following articles cover how to efficiently work with text boxes in Word.

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 are the simple steps you need in order to add a drop shadow to your text boxes.

   Adding Sidebars
When designing your document, you may want to use sidebars like you see in magazines and some books. This tip explains the easiest way to create your own sidebars, using 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.

   Changing Defaults for Text Boxes and Callouts
Do you find yourself frequently creating text boxes and callouts? This tip describes how to change the default settings and how you can easily create text boxes that exactly meet your common requirements.

   Changing Orientation of a Text Box
Want to change how a text box is oriented on the page? You can't do it, but you can adjust the dimensions of the box manually.

   Changing Text Orientation
Word allows you to change the orientation of text contained within certain objects, such as shapes, text boxes, and table cells. Here's how you do it.

   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.

   Columns within Text Boxes
When creating a layout for your document, you might use text boxes to position text in specific places. If you want those text boxes to contain columns of text, you'll be out of luck. This tip presents a handy workaround you can use.

   Comments in Text Boxes
If you use text boxes in your documents, you may sometime want to place a comment in the text box, the same as you can do with text not in the text box. Word doesn't allow you to add comments to text boxes, but there are a couple of workarounds you can use to get the same result.

   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.

   Extracting Text Box Contents
If your document has quite a few text boxes within it, you may want to extract the contents of those text boxes to a new document. This tip provides a couple of ways you can accomplish this task.

   Finding an Invisible Text Box
Text boxes can be a great aid in designing the layout of your document. What do you do when you can't find a text box that you want to delete, however? Here are a variety of approaches you can use to finding that errant text box.

   Finding and Replacing Text Boxes
The Find and Replace capabilities of Word are very powerful, but they still come up a bit short when searching for some elements of a document. One such case is when you want to find text boxes. This tip shows you how you can both find text boxes and replace them with a graphic.

   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.

   Getting Rid of a Text Box, but Not the Text
Text boxes are designed to hold text. (Makes sense, right?) If you want to get rid of a text box, yet still keep the text, there are two approaches you can take.

   Inserting a Formatted Text Box with a Macro
Macros allow you to do just about anything in Word, but not if you limit yourself to using just the Macro Recorder. This tip shows an example where you need to dig deeper to get just the results you want with your macro.

   Inserting a Text Box
Many people use text boxes to help organize and layout information on the page. Here's how you can add text boxes to your document.

   Making Resize to Fit Text the Default
When you insert a text box, Word automatically clears one of the key settings for the new text box. If you want this setting to be enabled, an easy way is to modify how you insert the text box, as described in this tip.

   Making Text Boxes Appear in a Printout
Add some text boxes to your document, and you might be surprised if they don't appear when you print the document. If this happens to you, follow the quick steps in this tip to make sure they print.

   Removing All Text Boxes In a Document
Text boxes are a common element of many types of documents. At some point you may want to get rid of all the text boxes in a document, however. Here are several ways that you can rid yourself of all the text boxes.

   Removing Text Boxes but Saving the Text
Text boxes can be handy when it comes to noting information in a document or dealing with some tricky layout issues. If you want, at some point, to get rid of text boxes but save the text contained within those text boxes, you'll appreciate the information provided in this tip.

   Removing the Box from a Text Box
Insert a text box and it is automatically formatted to have a border around it. Getting rid of the border is easy if you follow the steps in this tip.

   Resizing a Text Box
Text boxes allow you to "segment" information in your document and lay it out differently. You can easily resize these boxes by following the simple instructions in this tip.

   Rotating Fractions in a Text Box
Rotating graphics in Word is not always straight-forward, but it can be done. This tip examines a special need to individually rotate three graphics in different ways.

   Rounded Corners for a Text Box
Text boxes are great for positioning information the way you want it to appear in your page layout. Fortunately, you aren't limited to bland, square corners on those text boxes.

   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.

   Technique for Adding a Text Box to an Envelope
Text boxes can be a great design feature to use in laying out a document. You may want to add one to an envelope, however. The ideas in this tip can help make adding the text box even easier.

   The Changing Relationship of WordArt and Text Boxes
Two of the long-time features in Word are text boxes and WordArt. You might not think these two are related, but they are becoming more so with each passing version of Word.

   Updating a Field in a Text Box
If you put a field into a text box, you might be surprised to find that it doesn't update when you try to update all your fields. That is because Word doesn't really update "all" fields when you update. This tip presents several techniques you can use to achieve the updating you desire.

   Using Non-Printing Text Boxes
Text boxes can be helpful for segmenting information from your main document and for creating unique page layouts. What if you don't want the text boxes to print with your document, however? This tip discusses a few ways you can suppress the printing of text boxes.

   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.