Word boxes around text

Timothy apparently hit some control key that caused paragraphs in his document to appear in a box. The box enlarges with long sentences; pressing Enter begins a new box. The boxes do not print (thankfully), but they appear in new blank documents. It is as if there is a one-cell table, but there isn’t. Selecting the paragraphs and formatting for «no border» does not make the boxes go away. If Timothy just knew what to call it, he’s sure he could find the answer, but he’s stumped as to why this is happening.

If this problem crops up and you are using Word 2013 or a later version, it is very possible that you’ve inadvertently turned on the display of text boundaries. In older versions of Word, turning on text boundaries displayed a border on the page corresponding to the margins. In Word 2013 or a later version, the text boundaries are displayed around each paragraph on the page. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Text boundaries appear around individual paragraphs.

If this is your problem, you can turn off the display of text boundaries in this manner:

1. Display the Word Options dialog box. (In Word 2007 click the Office button and then click Word Options. In Word 2010 or a later version, display the File tab of the ribbon and then click Options.)
2. At the left side of the screen click Advanced.
3. Scroll through the options until you see the Show Document Content section. (See Figure 2.)



Figure 2. Advanced options in the Word Options dialog box.

4. Make sure the Show Text Boundaries check box is cleared.
5. Click OK.

If that does not fix your problem (or if you are not using Word 2013 or a later version), then check the style formatting for the Normal paragraph style. (How you modify styles has been discussed frequently in other WordTips.) In the universe of styles, the Normal style holds preeminence. It is the «root» style for almost all other built-in styles, and even for many custom styles.

The bottom line is that if the Normal style is formatted to have a box around it, then there is a good chance that all your paragraphs will have boxes around them. Check the style formatting and remove any boxes that may be associated with the style, and your problem may be immediately fixed.

In all honesty, though, the problem probably isn’t related to the Normal paragraph style. If it were, then the boxes would also print, and Timothy specifically said that his boxes didn’t print. There is, however, one final possibility—document or template corruption.

If the problem occurs in only a single document or a handful of documents, it could be that either the document or the template on which the document is based is corrupted in some way. Start by locating the Normal template (outside of Word) and renaming it to something else. Then, start Word and open the offending document. Create a new document and copy everything from the problem document (with the exception of the ending paragraph mark) to the new document. This process is detailed in this tip:

https://wordribbon.tips.net/T013284

Author Bio

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen…

Paul,

Thanks for your offer, not sure how to attach a doc to a forum message.

In the meantime, I have been experimenting with this and below are steps, results and solutions that I have found in this area. When I use the term «body text», it includes either table or non-table source data. Have found no difference in either source.

1. Enter some text in a property field. Select that text. Copy and Paste (standard) into the body area. Result: Body text is copied but is encapsulated a rectangle box (not a text box). This box will be printed along with the text. Solution: Select the boxed body text; Home tab, Font, Click on Clear Formatting icon upper, right.
2. Like 1 but Paste Special (unformatted text). Result and Solution same as 1.
Note: interesting in that once the boxed data appears in the body, all other line feeds will continue the boxing of directly entered data.
3.Enter text in a new document body. Select the text; Copy and Paste (standard) into a property field. Result: Text entered into the property field but the source body text is delineated by brackets. These brackets do not print. As you noted Paul, this indicates the text is bookmarked. Solution (as you suggested): Select the bracketed text. Select the Insert tab. Click the Bookmark icon. A Bookmark window lists all the bookmarks. Find the two that relate to this bookmark and delete from the table.
4. This is interesting! Like 3; however, Paste Special (unformatted text). Make sure the cursor is in the desired property box. Do the paste. Result: the body text is not pasted into the selected property field but into the body where the cursor was last set! Solution: None.
The purpose of this activity is based on the fact I am a heavy user of Metadata. I try to be consistent in the what field is used with what type of information. This leads to having an example pattern for each file’s field of use. Copy example from body text reference file to property fields. Sometimes, I find it useful to go the other direction; copy a property field data into my reference document for future use.

This is another problem that may not belong here, but does anyone know of any WORD to PDF convertor that does not place quotes around the keyword set in the resultant PDF document? With quotes around the complete set, cannot do single word searches. Must go into the resultant PDF document and remove the quotes each time.

Any of these problems fixed in Word2012?