Text Box to text

[appeng]

I have been given a 97 page document for review and to add comments.
It appears that it was scanned in and every paragraph is a text box.
Although I can edit and add to each text box the information in that text
box scrolls down and becomes hidden. I can resize the text box but that then
affects all text following and is to much of a headach.

Is there a way to select the entire document and convert it to normal text.
that is not paragraph by paragraph.

I am using Word 97

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

Try saving it as a text file.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[appeng]

Doug,

This does not seem to work. It saves a blank document.
I have tried going to edit > select all, but am not able to select anything
except the first blank line.

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreaciated.

 

[Jay Freedman]

You can try this macro (see http://www.gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm
if needed):

Sub ZapTextBoxes()
Dim oTB As Shape
For Each oTB In ActiveDocument.Shapes
If oTB.Type = msoTextBox Then
oTB.ConvertToFrame
End If
ActiveDocument.Frames(1).Delete
Next
End Sub

Unfortunately, the paragraphs will now appear in whatever order the
textboxes were anchored by the OCR program, which might be reverse
order or randomly scrambled. :-(

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

First make sure that what you're dealing with is really a text box and not a
frame. A text box will have circular white sizing handles; a frame has
square black sizing handles. If these are frames, you can probably remove
them by selecting the text and pressing Ctrl+Q (ResetPara), which restores
the default paragraph style, which is unlikely to include a frame. If there
is paragraph formatting you don't want to remove, right-click on the frame
border, choose Format Frame, and click Remove Frame.

If they are really text boxes, select one, double-click on the hashed border
to open the Format Text Box dialog, select the Text Box tab, click Convert
to Frame..., and then click OK. Select the next text box, press F4 (Repeat),
and continue through all the text boxes, then press Ctrl+Q to remove the
frames (if you need to use Remove Frame, note that F4 will work for this,
too).

Note that, depending on how the text boxes or frames were anchored to text
paragraphs on the page, the resulting text may be out of order. Also, you
may be left with a paragraph border; you can remove that using Format |
Borders and Shading: None or by clicking the No Border button on the Borders
flyout on the Formatting or Tables and Borders toolbar.