I just upgraded from Office 97 to Office 2000. When I opened a file that I previously used in Word 97, I now have the following formatting problem:
The vertical text alignment is supposed to be centered, but a graphic (vertical line to the left of the left margin) moves the text insertion point toward the top of the page. When I delete the graphic, the insertion point returns to the vertical center of the page.
I have tried to adjust the graphic settings in Format Autoshape | Layout | Advanced, but I have not been able to change this behavior.
Any idea how to fix this?
Thanks, Clem.
I tried this in Word 2002 SP1. It looks to me as though you have
stumbled across an amusing bug in floating graphic positioning.
You can work around it by setting Format Autoshape | Layout | Advanced
| "Move object with text" and typing a number into he box. This makes
the vertical position relative to the anchor paragraph instead of
relative to the page. As your text moves the line will move, which may
or may not be convenient. (But thanks to the bug that is going to
happen anyway, and this way you can understand what is going on.)
The source of the problem appears to be a Word internal confusion
about floating item vertical "relative to page" measurements when the
page setup vertical alignment is set to center (or probably anything
but top).
If the graphic vertical alignment is set relative to page and page
setup is set for center alignment, the following rules seem to apply:
If you type a vertical position into the "Advanced" box, the
measurement is interpreted relative to the current top of the body
text, not relative to the top of the page as you would expect, and not
relative to the center of the page as your second guess might be.
If you drag the graphic and release it, Word reads the vertical
position relative to the (real) top of the page and enters that number
into the box. It then interprets that number relative to the current
top of text and positions the graphic accordingly! The resulting
behavior is quite startling.
If you set vertical position relative to the text anchor instead of
relative to the page and type in a number, everything works. However,
if you then click the radio button to change the position into
"relative to page", Word again reads the box position on the screen as
relative to the real page and enters the number and interprets it as
relative to current top of text.
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Similar weirdness applies if page setup is set for bottom alignment.
The bottom line is that dragging into position is hopeless. Of course
this includes the dragging involved in drawing the object...
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So why did your text jump up when you drew the vertical line? Here's
my take on it.
Let's say that you had a single text paragraph vertically centered on
the page and you drew a vertical line just to the left of the
paragraph. When you let go of the mouse button, Word measured the
position of the line relative to the real page (i.e. some inches below
the top of page) and interpreted it as relative to the top of text
i.e. your paragraph, so the line ended up below the paragraph. Word
then centered the combination of paragraph and line on the page. Since
the line was below the paragraph and the combination had to be
centered, the paragraph had to move up.
Thank you for finding this; it has given me an hour of amusement. Of
course, I am easily amused, and I don't have to get your document
finished on time...
Use the work-around; set the graphic relative to text and type in
numbers instead of dragging.
Bob S
