Microsoft Word 2010 and text boxes

[DermottMullin]

I am doing a very lengthy publication (family history) that has taken many years and will no doubt take a few more before I bring it to fruition. But I am not very deft at my computer, in fact I'm pretty slow witted at it! Nevertheless I can get around Word functionally well except in a few "pet hate" areas. Way out ahead of those handful of hate relationships I have managed to build up with it, is with text boxes, and how they simply will not respond as I want them to, to very many of my instructions, my pleas or my curses. And, as I have done it, the project relies heavily on text boxes.
And the problem has been with me all the way through my previous generations of Word (98 and 2003).
In particular, when trying to move (drag) a text box to another page, so often it will simply not be dragged! Like a stubborn puppy it will "dig its heels in" in one way or another. Often it will just dart back to where it came from or, more usually, if it allows itself to be dragged, it will leave behind an entirely blank area devoid of any text or any content at all, and what I can only think of as a "ghost" formatted area, that is i)not automatically taken up (as I am sure it ought to be) with surrounding text, or ii)that absolutely WILL not be filled up with any other text I try to contrive just to fill the hole, and iii)that also will NOT be deleted, no matter how I try to coax or persuade it into any of those three options.
I have had some limited success with removing the content text from the text box, then deleting the now EMPTY text box (which having been emptied then deletes easily and cleanly enough) and then creating a new text box in the new target area (into which I re-insert the content text). But that can hardly be the sensible solution.
Linking text boxes does not offer any form of solution, in fact seems to create its own additional complications to the essential underlying problem.
I have (over the years!) fiddled with all the "in line with text" and other positioning, layout and wrapping options until I go numb in the skull with frustration and frenzy. I would, I am sure, long since have finished the project and had it in print had I not spent years (in total) just trying to shuffle these unmentionable text boxes around the place.


Obviously I am missing a trick (or a few brain cells). Help! Make me love my text boxes!

"All boxed in"

[gmayor]

Text boxes are graphics objects and frankly are best avoided. Word is not a page layout application and trying to force it to be one with large numbers of text boxes is a recipe for a document that will become unstable and at the very least, difficult to edit. If you want your text 'boxed', use tables. If you want a page layout application, then you need DTP software and not Word.

[DermottMullin]

Thanks Graham,
What you say is revealing, and rather disconcerting to me. But none of my individual text boxes could on its own be too taxing for a word processing system that for many decades has held itself out to millions upon millions of ordinary users as offering the capacity to do what I am asking it to. Mine are simple text boxes, each and every one of them. Microsoft says that text boxes can be moved, so surely that must be not only possible but WELL within Word's very ordinary capacity to do so. Surely Word, as a word processing system, could not market itself as such for all its length of time in existence if it could not cope with the simplicity of what I am asking it to do. Surely it is ME who must be doing something wrong or not doing something I should be doing.
"Allboxedin"

[Charles Kenyon]

I utilize text boxes extensively, but not a lot of them within one document. Try displaying graphic anchors and moving the anchor for the particular text box or surrounding text with the anchor.