You have to realize that Word is word processing software, not page layout
software. It thinks in terms of text flow, not page layout. You can insert a
graphic either in the text flow (In Line with Text) or with the text flowing
around it (wrapped). If you choose the latter, however, the wrapped
("floating") graphic must be anchored to a text paragraph, and that text
paragraph must be on the same page. Consequently, you cannot entirely fill a
page with a floating graphic. It's therefore generally much simpler to make
the graphic less than a full page.
If you must fill the page with the graphic, accept that it might was well be
inline. The graphic is going to have to be anchored to a text paragraph
(even if that paragraph is empty), and that's going to interrupt the flow of
text anyway, so you might as well put the graphic *in* the text paragraph.
To make this process as painless as possible, do the following:
1. Define a style for your graphics (it can be pretty much the same as
Normal, maybe centered, maybe with some Space Below). Insert a paragraph in
this style and type a placeholder of some sort (Figure 1.1 goes here). Put
this paragraph immediately following the paragraph in which the figure is
referred to.
2. Define a style for the captions (or use Word's built-in Caption style,
modified as desired), and type in your captions.
3. If the caption is to go below the graphic, format the graphic style as
"Keep with next." If the caption goes above the graphic, apply that
formatting to the caption style. (Another way to handle this is to put each
graphic and its caption in a single-column, two-row borderless table.)
4. Don't even think about inserting any of the actual graphics until editing
is complete. They just bog you down, anyway, and you won't be able to
finalize placement till the end of the writing/editing process.
5. When you reach the end of the process, go through the document from the
beginning. Ascertain where each figure will need to go based on allowing the
previous page to fill with text. This is where things get tricky.
6. Sometimes a paragraph will helpfully end on the last line of a page. More
often you'll need to break a paragraph in the middle in order to fill the
page with text. Ruthlessly do this, inserting a page break after the
paragraph break.
7. Insert another page break after the graphic+caption.
8. If your paragraphs are not justified and don't have a first-line indent,
you're home free, but that won't be the case, will it? So you have to fudge.
Insert a line break to justify the last line of the paragraph you truncated
before the figure. Format the line break as Hidden or 1 pt. so that it
doesn't spill over to the next page. The rest of the paragraph, on the page
after the graphic, will have a first-line indent, which you can remove
either manually or by applying a No Indent style.
9. At this point you can insert your graphic on the mostly empty page.
10. Repeat for each additional graphic.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site:
http://www.mvps.org/word
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