Text Box disables cursor

[Marvin42]

In brief: Sometimes after inserting a text box, the mouse cursor ceases to
behave within the new text box.

At length: As I wrote back in January, the association I work for uses many
thousands of documents that use frames to create scholar's margins as
headings. In Word 2003 the frames worked beautifully, but in Word 2007 the
frames' "keep with next" function frequently fails at page breaks, causing
marginal headings to be orphaned from the paragraphs to which they're
attached.

So I'm investigating replacing frames with text boxes. As a first step I'm
simply modifying existing documents by removing frames from the paragraph
styles that use them, and then manually inserting text boxes as a
replacement. For this purpose I created a text box QuickPart that duplicates
the positioning of the old frames. I use the QuickPart by putting my cursor
in a paragraph, inserting the text box, and bingo: I have a box right where
I need it to be. (So far so good.)

Then I paste the old scholar's margin text (including the paragraph marker,
which may contain some extra spacing in the left margin or lower margin) into
the text box. So the overall procedure is: create text box; cut marginal
text; paste marginal text into text box; repeat.

The problem occurs after I've repeated the procedure five or six times.
I'll create a text box, cut the marginal text, and then attempt to paste it
into the text box, but I can't. No matter where I place the cursor in the
text box, it refuses to change from the "cross" used to position graphics
into the "I-beam" used to insert text. I can still get the right cursor when
working in the text boxes I created previously; but from now on in this
document I cannot get a proper text cursor in any new text box.

All is not lost: I can still right-click the text box and select "Edit
text." That allows me to type in the text box (but I have to use arrow keys
since the cursor is still broken). And I can close and re-open the document
to get normal cursor behavior back -- but the fix in this case only lasts for
another five or six text boxes.

It's a bit maddening -- like having the Heading 1 style suddenly up and quit
on you for no good reason. Has anybody else seen this behavior?

 

[Guest]

At the point when you can no longer paste into the Text Box, what happens if
you manually insert a new Text Box?

 

[Marvin42]

Thanks for asking, Terry. At that point any new text box I insert behaves
the same way: the cursor refuses to work on the text within the box. (But
the cursor behaves normally in text boxes created before the oops moment.)

That being said, I must report that this morning I may have discovered a key
distinction. It's possible that this problem happens only in Word 2007
documents that were converted from Word 2003. If the document was created in
Word 2007 to begin with, then the text box issue might not exist. I want to
test more, though, before I say I'm confident about this distinction.

 

[Guest]

That could be so. Please let us know how it goes.

Terry

Thanks for asking, Terry. At that point any new text box I insert behaves
the same way: the cursor refuses to work on the text within the box.
(But
the cursor behaves normally in text boxes created before the oops moment.)

That being said, I must report that this morning I may have discovered a
key
distinction. It's possible that this problem happens only in Word 2007
documents that were converted from Word 2003. If the document was created
in
Word 2007 to begin with, then the text box issue might not exist. I want
to
test more, though, before I say I'm confident about this distinction.

 

[Marvin42]

Well, I'm starting to become really perplexed. I have one document that I'd
expect to have the text-box problem, but it doesn't. (Most of my existing
documents [of the sort in question] do exhibit the problem, however.) In an
attempt to remove convertion-from-Word2003 from the equation I've created
fresh documents in Word 2007...that turned out to exhibit the problem. But
I've also created fresh documents in Word 2007 that didn't exhibit the
problem. And the weird exception mentioned above is definitely from the
converted-from-Word2003 family of documents.

So it's hard for me to pin down an exact cause. At this point I think I'm
going to have to strip all my customizations out of Word and start adding
them in one at a time until something breaks.

 

[Guest]

One possible help may be if when one of the documents goes bad, save it,
close it and then open it with the Open and Repair option to see if it finds
a problem, repairs it and lists what was repaired

Terry

Well, I'm starting to become really perplexed. I have one document that
I'd
expect to have the text-box problem, but it doesn't. (Most of my existing
documents [of the sort in question] do exhibit the problem, however.) In
an
attempt to remove convertion-from-Word2003 from the equation I've created
fresh documents in Word 2007...that turned out to exhibit the problem.
But
I've also created fresh documents in Word 2007 that didn't exhibit the
problem. And the weird exception mentioned above is definitely from the
converted-from-Word2003 family of documents.

So it's hard for me to pin down an exact cause. At this point I think I'm
going to have to strip all my customizations out of Word and start adding
them in one at a time until something breaks.

--
Marvin Long, Jr.

That could be so. Please let us know how it goes.

Terry

 

[Marvin42]

"Open and Repair" appears not to see anything wrong.

I still don't understand why I had a mystery document that should have been
broken, but where everything worked.

However, in the aggegate, here's what I seem to be observing. If I try to
alter a document that used frames for scholars margins to using text boxes,
then I just about always end up with the "cursor doesn't work in a text box
problem" after I've inserted a half-dozen boxes. This *includes* cases where
I copy and paste "unformatted text" from a frame-based document into a
text-box-based template.

On the other hand, if I copy text from a frames-based document into Notepad,
then copy the plain text from Notepad into my new text-box-based Word
template, then I don't seem to have the textbox-vs-cursor bug. Getting the
frames completely out of the picture before I start using text boxes seems to
be a key step. (Maybe I can find a more efficient way of doing that.)

 

[Terry Farrell]

There is a Word command "Remove Frames" that does just what it says and
leaves the text, though I am not sure exactly will happen to the text when
it is in the margin. My guess is that executing the Remove Frames command
will leave the text in the body adjacent to the Frame location at the
closest paragraph break. That should let you insert a Text Box and Cut &
Paste the text into the Text Box floating in the margin.

Terry Farrell

 

[Marvin42]

Thanks for the suggestion - Remove Frames is a handy tool. Text from the
frames finds its way back into the main column in the paragraph preceding the
paragraph to which the frame was attached -- which is exactly what I'd want.

Unfortunately, after more testing it seems that neither "remove frames" nor
the "paste by means of Notepad to create plain text" method eliminates the
squirrely text box vs. the cursor issue.

What I find is that after creating and pasting text into some number of text
boxes -- usually between five and 10 -- I will hit a string of text boxes
where the cursor refuses to work within the box.

The good news is that I can right-click the box, choose "Edit," and paste &
manipuate text within the box by using the keyboard and arrow keys. And I've
just discovered that if I keep on doing this and don't give up, then after
some number of text boxes -- maybe three or four -- the mouse cursor will
return and start working again within any future text boxes I make.

The cursor still refuses to behave in the text boxes where it originally had
a problem, at least until the document has been closed and re-opened, but the
bug seems to correct itself eventually if you doggedly continue making text
boxes.