Unfortunately, there isn't a magic bullet here that solves all your problems but if you learn a bit more about pagination and how floating shapes behave you are better placed to understand what will happen as content gets added or removed.

Publisher will let you position a graphic and have text flow around it but you will find that adding a page of text in front of the graphic results in the associated text moving to the next page and leaving the graphic on a page not relevant to it. So I don't think moving to Publisher is necessarily the answer you were looking for.

Firstly, when you float (or wrap) a graphic, it positions itself on the page and links itself to a paragraph nearby which is now considered its 'anchor'. You should be able to see this anchor as a popup icon when you select the graphic (if your Word Options>Display> includes viewing Object Anchors). If that paragraph moves, the graphic will also move, according to the positioning rules assigned for its movement. If that paragraph is pushed onto a different page by preceding content - the graphic will also change pages to stay with that paragraph. You can look and edit these positioning rules by right clicking on the graphic and choosing Size and Position > Position.

So knowing the graphic positioning rules is the first part of the story, next you need to understand the paragraph pagination rules. Each paragraph has settings which govern how it behaves in terms of pagination. If you select a paragraph, and go to the Home Tab and click the dialog launcher in the bottom right corner of the Paragraph group, you will see the Paragraph Format dialog. On the Line and Page Breaks tab, you see 4 check boxes that control the pagination attributes of that paragraph. If you understand what each of those options do, you will understand how the document controls the pagination of those paragraphs.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia