Deleting All Text in Linked Text Boxes

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated March 26, 2021)

Normally, you cannot delete all the text within text boxes. If you select all the text boxes in a document and press the Del key, the text boxes themselves will be deleted, along with the text inside. If you press Ctrl+A (or choose Select All from the Edit menu) and press Del, everything in your document disappears.

If your text boxes are linked, however, you can delete all the text within all linked text boxes by following these steps:

Select any text box in your document. You can do this by pressing Alt+Up Arrow or Alt+Down Arrow.
Press Ctrl+A. Word selects all the text in all the linked text boxes. (If all the text in your document is selected, then you didn't have a text box selected in step 1.)
Press the Del key. All the text is deleted.

If text boxes are not linked, you will need a macro to delete the text in each text box, one at a time.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (1496) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

MORE FROM ALLEN

Adjusting the Width of Characters

Need to adjust how your characters look horizontally? Word provides an easy way you can scale the horizontal appearance ...

Discover More

Forcing the Date to the Next Wednesday

Working with today's date in Word is easy. Trying to manipulate dates to come up with a future one can be an entirely ...

Discover More

Making Page Breaks More Visible

When you view a worksheet in Print Preview, Excel shows you the position of page breaks once you return to the worksheet. ...

Discover More

Do More in Less Time! Are you ready to harness the full power of Word 2013 to create professional documents? In this comprehensive guide you'll learn the skills and techniques for efficiently building the documents you need for your professional and your personal life. Check out Word 2013 In Depth today!

More WordTips (ribbon)

Using the Spike to Edit

Most Word users are proficient in cutting and pasting text using the Clipboard. One of the lesser-known editing tools, ...

Discover More

Breaking Into Sentences

Macros allow you to easily extend what you can do with Word. If you have a common editing task, that task can often be ...

Discover More

Adding Tabs at the Beginning of a Line

Press a tab at the beginning of a paragraph, and Word normally assumes you want to indent the paragraph. If you don't ...

Discover More

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WordTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

View most recent newsletter.

Comments

If you would like to add an image to your comment (not an avatar, but an image to help in making the point of your comment), include the characters [{fig}] (all 7 characters, in the sequence shown) in your comment text. You’ll be prompted to upload your image when you submit the comment. Maximum image size is 6Mpixels. Images larger than 600px wide or 1000px tall will be reduced. Up to three images may be included in a comment. All images are subject to review. Commenting privileges may be curtailed if inappropriate images are posted.

Notify me about new comments ONLY FOR THIS TIP

Notify me about new comments ANYWHERE ON THIS SITE

Hide my email address

What is seven less than 7?

2016-08-20 23:47:48

Mary Lu Strange

I read the information about the text boxes above. What if one wants to delete the text boxes, but keep the text, is it possible?

This Site

Got a version of Word that uses the ribbon interface (Word 2007 or later)? This site is for you! If you use an earlier version of Word, visit our WordTips site focusing on the menu interface.