MS-Word psychotic text boxes!

[W. Dale Hall]

Howdy there, all MicroSofties. My apologies for the massive
cross-posting, but I am simply stymied.

I'm writing a document in MS-Word. It's from

MS-Office 2003 v11.5604.5606,

if that information you get from the tab named "About MS-Office"
means anything.

This document is rife with flow charts (OK, it has eight. On the other
hand, it's an 8-page document, so I imagine "rife" about suits it). In
fact, that's the main reason for this document: to display and describe
the flow charts. I use a lot of text boxes to hold labels; most have
no border lines and no fill color. Lately, say over the last several
hours, I have had text boxes behave strangely: I'll have one in one part
of a figure with [wouldn't you know] text in it. Then I'll open another
one in the same figure, different area, and begin typing in it. As I'm
typing in the new text box, the text is appearing IN BOTH BOXES!!!

Sorry for yelling there, but I don't get it.

This doesn't appear to happen first thing in a new figure, but somehow
after a while, it (MS Word? Office? CLIPPY?) gets this goofy notion that
all text must belong to all new text boxes. I'll open another text box
and yet another one, and type in one of those, and sure enough, they'll
all have all the text.

WTF??

Any comments, even rude ones, would be welcome.

Thanks a bunch.

Dale.

 

[W. Dale Hall]

Hi W.,



Just so we're all on the same wave-length, to start off There's no one
from Microsoft in this newsgroup. It's a peer-to-peer forum, where we all
try to help one another.

I recognize the problem you describe. There seems to be an instability in
the Word text boxes that started appearing in Word 2002. Somehow, they do
all seem to get "hooked together" in the binary file structure.

I have one suggestion that might help, and I'll be interested to learn
whether it does:

Save the document in the Word 2003 XML format. Close it. Open it again and
save as a normal Word document.

... the rest deleted ...

This is just a follow-up to let one and all know that (at least at this
point in my preparation of said document [I'm 20 minutes into editing
the saved and resurrected file]) the above hint seems to work. Hurray!

I thank you, my computer thanks you, my family thanks you, and if you'd
like the thanks of anyone in particular, I'm sure they'd be thanking you
as well.

Oh, and thanks again.

Dale