Text Boxes

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Text Boxes

Have you ever had a problem getting some text to sit at a certain part of the screen? Or wonder how people made the text go vertical on those flyers with the tear-off phone numbers? Well, you'll learn today that text boxes can be a very handy feature.

Creating a Text Box

For your assignment, you will create a text box in the same "XXXdraw.doc" document you used in the previous lesson. To insert a text box,

Either click go to the "Insert" menu and select "Text Box" or click on the text box button in the Drawing toolbar. This button looks like the following:

Your pointer will turn into a plus sign (+).

Click and drag to create a text box of a size you want. Do this twice to create two text boxes.

Linking Text Boxes

For your assignment, you are asked to link your two text boxes. To do this:

Right-click on top of your first text box to get a pop-up menu. Now, be careful about this since there are two menus you can get. There is one when your pointer is on the centre of the text box. The menu I want you to get is when you put your pointer on top of the *border* of the text box and right-click
Select "Create Text Box Link." Your pointer will turn into what looks like a coffee cup. Move it on top of the second text box and click. This creates a link between the two boxes, so when the text you enter fills up the first text box, it will spill over into the second one. This is very useful when creating newsletters to send home to parents. Type some text into the first text box and keep typing until it spills over into the second box. Save your changes.

Changing Text Direction

For your assignment, you need to change the direction of the text in your text boxes.

There is a toolbar for using text boxes. To view it, go to the "View" menu, select "Toolbars," then click on "Text
Box." Note that one of the text boxes must be selected for the toolbar option to be displayed in the View menu. The toolbar will look like the following:

From left to right, the buttons are: Create text box link, Break forward link, Previous text box, Next text box, and Change text direction.

For your assignment, change the direction of the text in both of your boxes. To do this, select the first box and click the "Change text direction" button in the Text Box toolbar. Click this button more than once to see your directional options.

Formatting Text Boxes

Next, you will format your text boxes. To do this, select a text box by clicking on it, then go to the "Format" menu and select "Text Box." A shortcut for this is to right-click on the border of a selected text box and choose "Format Text Box." A window similar to the following will appear:

This may look very familiar to you, because this window is almost the same as the one you used to format a picture in Word I. You can add a coloured background and make it semi-transparent. You can add a border to the text box by using the line option.

For your assignment, please do the following formatting to your text boxes:

Give each text box a coloured background and a border.
You may notice that your text box may move if you insert text or press enter in the lines above it. Keep your text boxes in the same position. To do this,
- For Word 97 users, go to the "Position" tab and remove the checkmark next to "Move object with text."
- For Word 2000 users, go to the "Layout" tab, then click on the "Advanced" control at the bottom right and remove the checkmark next to "Move object with text.""

Save your changes. To explore the other options, click on each of the tabs for Size, Position, Wrapping, and Text Box. To learn more about a feature, click the question mark button at the top of the window , then click the item you wish to learn more about.

Please continue to the next lesson on Lines and Arrows.