Graphics in Word2000 run into/over the footnotes and footer

[logbook]

I have a large Word 2000 document with lots of embedded graphics. More accurately these are linked, rather than actually embedded, but the same things happens regardless of how they are entered into the document.

The problem is keeping the graphic with the relevant paragraph as the document is changed around, text being added and subtracted. What I find is that regardless of the settings used on the graphics, they keep ending up clashing with the header, footer, or footnotes. This is very irritating.

In Word 95 the graphic was inserted into a frame. The frame would jump from one page to the next as the amount of text before it changed. This is what you would expect. Now in Word 2000 there are no explicit frames.

Suppose I have a graphic which is half a page wide. I want the text to wrap around it, so I use the “Layout: Square” option. Text flows neatly around the graphic. I want the graphic to stay with the relevant paragraph, so I use the “move object with text” option. I don’t want overlap, and I don’t want the anchor locked relative to the page, so I don’t use those options. Typically the graphic is “left- aligned, relative to the margin”. Fine. The problem is that when text is added pages away in the document, the graphic moves closer and closer to the bottom of the page, and then flows smoothly into the footnotes and footer!

It seems like a bug in the program to me and yet it still seems to exist in later Word versions. This leads me to think that there is some other option that might stop it overflowing like this. Does anybody know?

 

[tsurikov]

Hi logbook,

I think you are experiencing a headache that many, many other people out there run into - Word's really poor handling of graphic layouts. I don't know how many hours I spent trying to get Word to handle my dissertation text and graphics properly - no matter what I did, I kept running into problems similar to what you faced. And I personally know dozens of people who've run into it as well.

Here are my two solutions, both of which have always worked well for me:

1) Have all your graphics in line with the text. In this way, your graphic is just like another block of text, and Word handles this very nicely. This way you'll never have problems with images running into footers, jumping around on a page, moving away from the associated text, and so on.

2) If you absolutely must have text flowing around a graphic, finish all your text editing first and then insert the graphics. It's not very convenient or flexible - but it works.

Good luck,
--Michael

 

[logbook]

Michael,

Thanks for the moral support and the information.