Microsoft Word For Mac Add Line Around Text Box

Microsoft Word For Mac Add Line Around Text Box
Microsoft Word For Mac Add Line Around Text Box Indesign
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Find the 'Draw Text Box' option at the bottom left of the window and click this option. Position your cursor wherever you desire the box to be in your document. Click and drag your mouse across the document to create the box. Click the 'Insert' tab, select 'Text Box,' and then click 'Simple Text Box.' Replace the default content in the text box with your own. Resize the rounded rectangle shape to fit the content of your text box.

When you’re under the gun with a brief or something else that’s due ASAP, the last thing you need is Microsoft Word creating some formatting snafu that defies logic. Particularly if you’re a solo attorney working sans assistant, you need to fix that formatting fast and get back to the business of legal writing. Here are some quick tricks to try.

Unless otherwise noted below, all instructions and screenshots are for Microsoft Office 2010 for Windows.

Diagnostics

The first step in solving any problem is diagnosing it. The most useful tools Microsoft Word has for figuring out what’s going on with your text are the Status Bar, Show/Hide, and Reveal Formatting.

Pimp Out Your Status Bar

The Status Bar (that long gray bar across the bottom of your Microsoft Word window) can give you a lot more diagnostic information than most users realize. To maximize its usefulness, right-click anywhere along the blank spaces of the gray bar to get this contextual menu:

I always suggest checking as many options as possible. For example, knowing that you’re in Section 3 of your document can help with diagnosing problems with headers and footers, particularly when you’ve imported text from WordPerfect (which can be very sneaky about embedding unwanted section breaks).

Turn On Your Codes

Microsoft Word For Mac Add Line Around Text Box

To me, it’s always useful to be able to see visual representations of things like hard paragraph breaks and tabs. Fortunately, this is easily done. Just click the paragraph symbol (called Show/Hide) in the Paragraph section of the Home tab in versions 2007 or 2010 (or if you’re in version 2003 or earlier, click the Show/Hide button in the Standard toolbar). Show/Hide is particularly useful for diagnosing spacing or justification problems.

If you find all those codes distracting, leave it on just long enough to diagnose your problem and turn it off when you’re finished.

Reveal Formatting, a.k.a. Word’s Reveal Codes Replacement

You can get a lot more information, though, from Microsoft Word’s Reveal Formatting feature. Just click SHIFT-F1, and the Reveal Formatting pane will appear on the right-hand side. Wherever you place your cursor, Reveal Formatting will not only show you how that text is formatted, it will give you hyperlinks to take you straight to the correct menu to fix it.

And if you want to know why one paragraph doesn’t look like another, simply place your cursor in the first paragraph, check the “Compare to another selection” check box, then click your cursor into the paragraph you want to compare to. Reveal Formatting will show you the differences.

Fixing What’s Wrong

If using any of the above tools doesn’t make it obvious how to fix something, or you’re just in that much of a hurry, you’re not stuck. There are a couple of different ways to simply force your formatting to behave.

Format Painter

If you see some other text in the document that looks like what you wish your misbehaving text looked like, the fastest way to make it conform is to use the Format Painter. Go to the Home tab (or, in versions 2003 or earlier, go to the Standard toolbar), place your cursor inside the text you want your misbehaving paragraph to emulate, click the paintbrush icon, then click or select the text you want to fix.

If you want to fix several pieces of text without having to repeat this entire sequence, double-click the paintbrush icon to make it persistent (in other words, to allow you to repeat the “fix” step several times), then click the paintbrush icon again when you’re finished.

Fast Fixes: CTRL+SPACE/CTRL+Q/CTRL+SHIFT+N

Frankly, there are days when you don’t care why your formatting’s wrong, you just want it fixed. Now.

For those moments, let me suggest these three shortcut keys:

CTRL+SPACE – This removes all character-level formatting—funky fonts, underlining, boldface, italics, etc. Just select the text you want to fix and hit this key combination (hold down your Control key and press the space bar).

CTRL+Q – This removes all paragraph-level formatting—weird indents, line spacing, extra spacing before and after the paragraphs, etc. Again, select the text, hold down your Control key and press the letter Q.

CTRL+SHIFT+N – This returns the selected text to Normal formatting (however Normal is defined in that particular document’s Styles). You’ll need a bit more manual dexterity here: select your text, then hold down the Control and Shift keys together and press the letter N.

Any of these shortcut key combinations will return the text to something you can work with without you having to wander through the menus looking for a fix. And when you’re in a hurry, isn’t that what you really want?

Microsoft Word For Mac Add Line Around Text Box Indesign

Featured image: “fix” from Shutterstock.

Comments in Word allow you to provide feedback in a document without changing the text or layout. You can place the cursor in the content or select content (text, images, tables, etc.) and add a comment about that part of the document.

RELATED:How to Always Show Comment Lines in Microsoft Word

When you add a comment to some text in a document and then click away, you may notice that there is no line connecting the comment to the text it corresponds to (as shown on the image below), until you move your mouse over the comment or put the cursor in, or select that text, again. If you want to be able to see at a glance which comments correspond to which text, without having to hover your mouse over each comment, you can easily add the lines back to the comments.

There are different views for comments. In the Simple Markup view, there is no line from the text to the comment until you hover over the comment or select, or put the cursor in, the text associated with it. The All Markup view shows all the lines to the comments all the time, whether the comment or the associated text is selected or not. So, to see all the lines to the comments, you can switch to the All Markup view. Here’s how.

Start by clicking the “Review” tab.

In the Tracking section of the Review tab, click the Display for Review drop-down list at the top of the section and select the “All Markup” option.

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If you don’t see the drop-down list, you may need to widen the Word window. Or, you can click on the “Tracking” button to access the options in the Tracking section.

Once you’ve selected All Markup, you will immediately see a line connecting each comment to its corresponding text.

If you have a lot of comments in your document, the All Markup view may be a bit confusing. You may want to go back to the Simple Markup view and hover over each comment to see which text it’s connected to.

Changing the markup view in one document applies to all other documents you open after that.