viewing text boxes in normal view

[Guest]

I am creating a template for people throughout my company to use for thier
FYIs. We have done this in the past and have run into an issue where people
open the document as an attachment and it comes up up in normal view. The
problem here is that our template has many text boxes which cannot be viewed
in normal view. I know that all you have to do is change the view to print
layout, but many of the people this is being sent to are not too techno savy.
I'm trying to see if maybe there is a way to view text boxes from that view.
The document we have for FYI has to have sections all over the page for
people to type in. I've tried every which way to make tables, but they for
some reason can't be displayed side-byside in normal view. Does anyone know a
way to make it so normal view with show text boxes?

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi James,

To answer the subject directly, no. Text boxes in Word are a kind of graphic
object in the drawing layer, and Normal view never shows any such objects.

It would be possible to convert the text boxes into frames. To see how this
works for one text box, right-click the edge of the box and select Format
Text Box, then click the Text Box tab. Click the Convert to Frame button in
the lower right, and ok the warning. A frame is similar to a text box in
being able to position it anywhere on the page, but it's in the text layer
so it shows up in Normal view. However, in Normal view it can't maintain its
position, so it just gets stuck in between the nearest paragraphs. Depending
on where the cursor was when the original text boxes were created, the
frames could wind up in odd places and even be out of order.

A better solution would be to create tables, as you mentioned. Although it's
true that Word isn't great with side-by-side tables (understatement!), you
can make one table look like two, three, or more side-by-side ones just by
turning off the borders of the cells that sit between the "sub-tables". This
would look the same in Normal view as in Print Layout view.