all your figures are belong to us

February 19, 2006 3:57 PM

Microsoft Word figure/photo/object placement is driving me insane. What is the secret to placeing figures in word? I'm used to Latex, where they are always at the top of the page, floating with the text. This seems to be impossible in word.

Additionally, what really drives me nuts is when you group items together, it resorts to the default of floating above the text. How do you set the default to something reasonable? (previous post here didn't help.)

posted by about_time to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Word tries to be helpful by autoformatting a bunch of stuff (including placement for images, footnotes, and so on). The problem is that Word doesn't do a good job. It's a word processor at heart rather than a layout tool, and it does a pretty dismal job at layout when it tries.

I know it isn't really answering your question to say "use a different tool", but that's probably the best thing to do here. For anything where layout matters, I'd go for Latex or something like InDesign (if you want a good GUI).
posted by amery at 4:17 PM on February 19, 2006

Best answer: I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to do, but it might help if you place your photos/text/etc inside a textbox, which you can then format however you'd like & place anywhere on the page. Text boxes don't move when you add text or objects to the document itself, so they're a lot less succeptible to the whims of Word's autoformatting.
posted by soviet sleepover at 4:36 PM on February 19, 2006

You can use a table. Insertion of images and text becomes much easier if you do so. The formatting is more controlled and you will not suffer floating images creeping all over your page. The table can either be visible or invisible.
posted by jadepearl at 6:24 PM on February 19, 2006

Response by poster: The textbox trick helped a little, thank you.

In case anyone reads this thread later on, it seems that grouped objects cut and paste into a textbox get re-digitized by Word. It's better to ungroup and paste in separately.
posted by about_time at 7:38 PM on February 19, 2006

I nearly lost my mind laying out a 100-page document with lots of images using Microsoft Word. The breaking point: when I selected the image and pushed "up," and the image jumped to the page below. When "up" means "down," you know you should install Quark or InDesign.

But, enough venting. I'm a bit unclear as to what exactly you're trying to do, so I don't know if this will help, and it sounds like your problem might already be solved.

But what most helped me was to double-click the picture (or go to Format->Picture), choose the "layout" tab, hit "advanced," and then uncheck "Move object with text" and uncheck "Lock anchor." That let me move the pictures around manually, and it stopped the pictures from jumping around at random.

It didn't solve the fact that the imaginary anchors themselves take up space -- sometimes throwing off paragraph spacing. However, I did find a way to move those anchors around independenly, which let me usually get them out of the way.

Good luck!
posted by salvia at 9:29 PM on February 19, 2006

Salvia's trick about box-unchecking is right, but amery is right about the bigger point. But the biggest point -- the reason why so many people still put up with images in Word -- is that the burden of doing so is still less than the burden of getting everyone in your organization able competently to use a professional layout application.
posted by MattD at 4:18 AM on February 20, 2006

or LaTex.
posted by zpousman at 6:15 AM on February 20, 2006