As a freelance academic editor, Norman works with documents from many (usually unknown) earlier versions of Word. In some it is not possible to drag and drop text; he has to, instead, use Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V to move it. Norman would be interested to know what underlying property in the document causes this inconsistent behavior.
The first thing to do is to check to see if drag-and-drop capability is turned on in the document. You can do that by following these steps:
Figure 1. The Advanced options of the Word Options dialog box.
The reason to check this out is that it is unclear from Microsoft's documentation whether this drag-and-drop setting is stored with the document or with the system on which the document is opened. If it is the former, then it would explain Norman's experience.
If drag-and-drop editing is turned on and the problem persists, it could actually be by design. You see, the ability to drag and drop text is dependent on the state in which Word is working at the time. Specifically, it won't work if there are dialog boxes open on the screen. For instance, if you have the Find and Replace dialog box open or the Cross-Reference dialog box open, then you cannot drag and drop. You also cannot use drag-and-drop editing while the macro recorder is running.
The solution in this case is to simply turn off the macro recorder and make sure that any open dialog boxes are closed before you try to drag and drop.
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