03-24-2008, 10:15 PM

I thought I was doing well with Office 08 for Mac, but I ran into a problem in word that is quite an annoyance.

I'm a student, and sometimes the notes posted for us to download by professors are unorganized or poorly formatted. I ran into this today and I'm trying to fix the problem, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to resize text boxes!



It allows me to resize the group of text boxes as a whole (as outlines by the dots), which partially solves the problem, but I was wondering how I can resize the individual boxes? Not only am I able to edit the text, but I also talked to someone using Office 04 on Windows, and they could do it, so I know it is not just an image.

[EDIT: I should add that double clicking each box results in the box being outlined in blue, along with the option to change the text in each box...but not the size of the text boxes. Typing more than the box fits does not increase the box size.]

If anyone has any insight, please let me know. I feel like an idiot with this problem - it' something I'd wiz through in the past. Thanks.

03-25-2008, 05:45 AM

I have never used Office for the Mac but it might be that they're grouped?

03-25-2008, 08:01 PM

I'm not sure, but I still haven't been able to figure it out. I tried it out in Office 07 on a PC runnings Windows XP and I was able to resize the boxes individually just fine.

Leaves me scratching my head.

03-25-2008, 08:25 PM

What app is this? Powerpoint?

You should be able to resize any box by ensuring the pick tool is selected (not th etext tool) and clicking once on any box outline.

03-25-2008, 10:19 PM

Excuse my lack of clarity. This is in Word 08.

Clicking once on a box selects the whole group, as shown above. A double-click lets me edit the text but not change box size. A double-click in the 07 for Windows version I used to today let me change box size as well as text.

I just can't for the life of me figure out how to get those 8 little blue dots around an individual box. But I thank you guys for trying to help.

03-26-2008, 04:16 AM

If you want, send me the file. Let me know on PM ...

03-26-2008, 04:35 AM

If you can't re-size the boxes to fit the text, then given that you can still edit the text in each box, why not change the font size so that it's a bit smaller and fits into the boxes?

It also looks like the text is 'bold' so turning that off too might help.

PS - I've got Office 08, so if the above doesn't help, feel free to send me the link to d/l the file and have a go to see if there's another way.

03-26-2008, 10:30 AM

Originally Posted by MikeIsGood

Excuse my lack of clarity. This is in Word 08.

Clicking once on a box selects the whole group, as shown above. A double-click lets me edit the text but not change box size. A double-click in the 07 for Windows version I used to today let me change box size as well as text.

I just can't for the life of me figure out how to get those 8 little blue dots around an individual box. But I thank you guys for trying to help.

OK, but where were the boxes created? The four blue dots around the entire object indicate that Word is treating this as a single object imported from somewhere else. Now if that 'somewhere else' is not present on your system, you'll have trouble editing it at the micro level. I have the same issue if I import a Visio digram into Word at work, then email it to my Mac, because my Mac does not have Visio and I cannot edit it in as much detail as I can at work.

This is one of the things I keep banging on about on these forums, because if I was using iWork or Neo Office, it would be even worse. Anyway all this only applies if this object was imported from elsewhere. If you created this in Word yourself, then I am stumped.

03-26-2008, 12:45 PM

Originally Posted by Zoolook

This is one of the things I keep banging on about on these forums, because if I was using iWork or Neo Office, it would be even worse.

Not really. No better, certainly, but (in the specific case of embedded-Visio-in-Word docs,) no worse.

03-26-2008, 03:33 PM

Originally Posted by technologist

Not really. No better, certainly, but (in the specific case of embedded-Visio-in-Word docs,) no worse.

In Word you can edit the text in the boxes (from a Visio import). I am pretty sure in anything OpenOffice based, you cannot - it essentially treats the object like a bitmap.

03-26-2008, 04:08 PM

Originally Posted by Zoolook

In Word you can edit the text in the boxes (from a Visio import). I am pretty sure in anything OpenOffice based, you cannot - it essentially treats the object like a bitmap.

Maybe it depends on how it's embedded...I have a Visio document embedded as an OLE object in a Word doc, and it shows up as a static vector image in Word 2004, Word 2007, (on a machine without Visio) Word 2008, and NeoOffice. In any of them, you can scale it and change the fill color, but that's it.