Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

chapter 4: styles, page layout, and tables 155

ible hyphens become visible (they look like an L-shaped bar and an equal sign, re-

spectively) and are ready for you to delete.

Note: If Hyphenation is grayed out on the Tools menu, you may be in Outline or Master Document view,

where hyphenation is unavailable.

Text Boxes

Putting text in a box of its own, sitting there independently on the page, represents

a quantum leap in text-flow management (see Figure 4-9). You can now format and

color a text box independently from everything else on the page, as well as use draw-

ing tools on it. In other words, text boxes let you think outside the box.

Note: A text box is fundamentally different from a paragraph with a border around it, although text boxes

can (and often do) have borders. For one thing, you can’t drag to resize a bordered paragraph, or flow text

around it, as you can with a text box. On the other hand, if all you want is a border and none of the other

fancy features, then creating a border around a plain old paragraph is the easiest way to do it.

Text boxes also emulate the way desktop publishing programs such as Quark XPress

and PageMaker handle text. If you’ve never used professional desktop publishing

software, consider this your first training ground.

Figure 4-9:

A text box is ideal for pull

quotes, like the one shown

here—extracted quotations

designed to catch the eye of

someone browsing your

document.

Lower left: The Text Box toolbar

can be rather fickle, since

sometimes it goes away all by

itself. (To get it back, click a text

box, then choose

View

→

Toolbars

→

Text Box.)

Right: When a text box is

selected, the Formatting Palette

changes to reflect the tools you

need.

Pull quoteText Box toolbar Text-wrap controls

Automatic

Hyphenation

156 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

Note: Text boxes completely disappear in Normal view. To work with text boxes, make sure you’re using

Page Layout view (View→Page Layout)—or be prepared for some surprises when you first see the print-

out.

Creating Text Boxes

To start a text box in your document, choose Insert→Text Box. (Another avenue: If

the Drawing toolbar is open [page 644], click the Text Box button, which looks like

a capital A with an I-bar next to it.)

Move the mouse to where you’d like the box to appear, and drag diagonally; Word

shows you the rectangular outline of the box you’re creating. The box is complete

when you let go of the mouse; you can always resize or move it later. To place text

inside your new text box, click inside it and type or paste.

Tip: To enclose existing text in a text box, first select the text, then choose Insert→Text Box or click the Text

Box button. Your text appears in a small text box, which you can then resize.

The Text Box Toolbar

The diminutive Text Box toolbar appears when you first create a text box, as shown

in Figure 4-9. Its buttons let you:

• Link and unlink text boxes. Linking text boxes sets up an automatic text flow

from one to another, exactly as in PageMaker, QuarkXPress, or any newspaper

on earth that makes you “Continue on page 13A.” As you add text to the first text

box, overflow text falls into the second one, even if it’s many pages away. Most

people never suspect that Word is even capable of this page-layout feature, per-

haps because it’s buried in this shy toolbar.

To link two text boxes, click the first box, and then click the Create Text Box Link

button (see Figure 4-9); the cursor turns into a pitcher, as if to pour text into the

next box. Now click the second box. Excess text flows automatically from the first

box into the second. (Press Esc or c-. to back out of the process.)

Tip: There’s nothing preventing you from repeating this process, linking three, four, or many text boxes

together into a continuously linked chain. You may drive your readers crazy, but you can do it.

To break a link between two boxes, click anywhere in the first of the two boxes

and click the Break Forward Link button. The text from the second box now

flows back into the first one, leaving the second box (and any subsequent boxes

in the chain) empty.

• Navigate from one text box to another. The next two buttons on the Text Box

toolbar (see Figure 4-9) come in handy if there are many text boxes distributed

far and wide in your document. They step you forward and back through the text

boxes, skipping over everything in between.

Text Boxes