Text Box or Style? How can I...?

[hephalumph]

I am working on a VERY large document (more than 3 million words). In it, I have created a style to apply to various paragraphs, where it is indented both left and right, has a border and background shading, and a unique font/style.



An example of such an entry (made up gibberish just to show the overall style) is:

---
Name: John Doe
Status: Healthy
Age: 24 years
Credit Rating: Fair (680)
Vehicle Preference: Minivans
Favorite Color: Plaid
Goals: John Doe would like to increase his credit rating to Good so that he and his family can afford a new home, as well as a pair of new minivans. He and his wife would like to start a new family, and have a history of twins on both sides.
---

I would like to prevent any such styled consecutive 'paragraphs' (most are a single line long), whether it is 2 or 10 of them, from breaking across pages - moving the whole section to the next page if necessary to prevent it.

I tried setting the options, "Keep Lines together" and "Keep with Next" - but those seem to have no effect. So what mistake am I making? What should I add to the paragraph style to keep them all together?

~

I also had a thought that with the way I am styling them, a text box may work as good or better.

But I don't know if it would be simple to convert hundreds, possibly thousands, of such paragraphs through the document into text boxes.

I know I already basically mimicked a text box appearance with the style I made. But it was super simple to do a find/replace on certain key words and apply the style to the majority of paragraphs that needed it, and not too difficult to just manually apply the style to the rest using a keyboard shortcut as I read through the document.

I think even if I set up a text box template, it would be a TON more work to convert them all to text boxes...?

Also, I am not sure if it would be any easier to prevent said text boxes from breaking across pages?

[Guessed]

I would start by saying DON'T use Text Boxes and Plaid is not a color.

Keep Lines Together would work if you have soft returns at the end of each line and a paragraph mark at the end of each entry.

If using paragraphs for each line, Keep with Next would work if you didn't have it turned on for the last line (Goals). Alternatively, you need a little empty paragraph (with a different style that doesn't keep with next to follow each entry block. Otherwise that last line will try to stick with the following (unrelated) entry and when everything is told to keep with next then Word has to break pages wherever it can. The Keep with Next method will be fiddly since it

You can also use table cells and tell Word to not allow rows to break. This can be done with a table style and gives the most flexibility in terms of styling the text inside and managing the shading and borders.

[Charles Kenyon]

Also, connsider using a Frame. A Frame can be part of a style definition making it easy to apply.
See Creating Frames in Word.

[spillerbd]

Originally Posted by Guessed

I would start by saying DON'T use Text Boxes and Plaid is not a color.

I learned Plaid was a velocity. "Space Balls"

[hephalumph]

Originally Posted by Guessed

I would start by saying DON'T use Text Boxes and Plaid is not a color.

Originally Posted by spillerbd

I learned Plaid was a velocity. "Space Balls"

Plaid is my second favorite color. My favorite is bright neon clear.

Originally Posted by Charles Kenyon

Also, connsider using a Frame. A Frame can be part of a style definition making it easy to apply.
See Creating Frames in Word.

I tried out frames, and it took a bit of finagling, but I figured it out and they're working as desired - thanks!

[Charles Kenyon]

Glad to have helped. Frames are an underutilized feature (which Microsoft does a good job of hiding).