Thank you for your thoughtful reply. You are right, I meant Quick Access, not Quick Start toolbar. That's how this all started. The text box option disappeared from that tool bar and attempts to restore it were not successful. The advice from this forum was to forget it and use the insert text box command instead, but that hasn't worked out well.

Regarding the other suggestions, I want the freedom to insert a textbox the size I want in the location I want. Sounds simple, have done it for years, but suddenly it isn't.

I appreciate the link to repair, I was concerned that it only applied to Office 365, but upon reading more I see that it covers Office 2016 also. It's comforting to know that "it won't hurt" -- that was my concern.

Thanks for all of your help to date.