MS word help

[applepie]

before i firebomb M$ office and destroy all the computers i see.

regarding MS word, I have some reports where i have to place figures and such in them which have to be grouped with legends and headings in text boxes.

Ok i figured out all my figures and everything has to be text boxes in order to group them fine.

a) Why when I cut and paste a grouped set of figures/text from one document to another, it just disappears. it cuts from file A, when select paste into file B, nothing happens. i dont see it in file B, its just a blank bit.

b) how do you select the text box itself and not the figures when you wish to edit the textbox? The textbox has no fill or lines by default so it cannot be seen. pretty much most of the time when i try to click a smaller text box near or ontop of a figure, it selects the figure instead.

c) how do you stop text boxes from changing automatically to match the figure size? i wish to have larger textbox and odd shapes compared to my figures. this allows to easily select the text box when i want to edit them rather than the figure itself.

d) when you click on the icon to draw a new text box how do you stop the stupid "insert your drawing here" box from appearing? Thats really pisses me off.

It will be great if there is some way to group figures/images not originating from MS word with MS word text boxes. Basically my diagrams have to have labels and annotations which I do with MS word. but they cannot be grouped unless placed in a MS word textbox which complicates thinds and causes a lot of problems.

if only the rest of the world would abandon MS word so I dont have to use this stupid software to write compatible reports. since all our docs have to be able to be edited and viewed using MS word instead of the other software we use to actually analyse or write internal reports.

and no dont start on Open Office.

sorry i am rather angry with stupid problems which are very annoying when trying to write complex reports. at least MS word hasnt collapsed this time due to size of docs and no. of link files/images yet although its getting there soon.

[Scuttler]

Normally when I have a table of figures I compile them in Exel and export them across to Word so sorry....not sure what's happening with your document.

[Garf]

What I would do is create your text boxes and data fields in an excel document, and then embed the relevent cells within the word doc. That way you take advantage of excel from within word.

G

[uwila]

Originally Posted by applepie

b) how do you select the text box itself and not the figures when you wish to edit the textbox? The textbox has no fill or lines by default so it cannot be seen. pretty much most of the time when i try to click a smaller text box near or ontop of a figure, it selects the figure instead.

Try hitting Esc when the figure is selected - this should then select the text box

[applepie]

i did a similar thing which is what we normally do, however, we dont use excel for some things as it doesnt have the features we need.

my internal reports have files linked/embedded to origin and occasionally sigma plot. this works fine as long as you have the appropriate software.

the new report has to be Word friendly so that some other muppet up the chain can edit the text easily.

so i have reformat most of it which i am totally clueless how to do it.

i cannot export some of the symbols/legends into word as well, it just comes up as the code we use. e.g "/ll% 1- XYZ" instead of the symbol in a particular size/colour and the text XYZ.

will test it out in excel and see if that fixes it.

cheers for the suggestions