If you look at many nonfiction books, you'll see that quite often, there will be text boxes with some sentence or other from the main text in them. I tried to insert a text box and copied text into it. However, above the text is a huge amount of white space. No effort I make to drag the top margin of the box down helps this. All that gets is moving the whole box over the top of the text. I don't want anything flashy, just the usual one sees in such boxes: plain text. If I make the whole box smaller, part of the text disappears.



How do I make the box fit the text without a huge lump of white space the top? Thanks.

Check the paragraph formatting of the first paragraph. Remove space-before formatting.

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, before and after are both 0.

Right click on the shape and choose Format Shape. In the Format Shape task pane under Shape Options select the right-most icon, Layout & Properties, where you can adjust margin sizes.