Why Do Images in My Word Document Move?

By Allen Wyatt for Word.Tips.Net

Why Do Images in My Word Document Move?

Have you ever placed pictures in your document, expecting them to stay in a set location, and then you find that they moved around? This is not uncommon in Word, and typically can be traced to a misunderstanding about how Word handles pictures.

When you place a picture in a Word document, you can place it either inline or floating. Inline pictures are great, and will stay exactly where you put them, because they are treated like any other character in a paragraph.

Inline pictures are wonderful for some purposes, particularly for larger pictures. Inline pictures, since they are treated just like text, follow the alignment of the paragraph in which they are placed. Thus, if you center the paragraph and the picture is the only thing in the paragraph, then the picture is centered. Likewise, you can left- or right-align the picture by simply using the paragraph alignment tools on the Home tab of the ribbon. The drawback to inline pictures, of course, is that text doesn’t wrap around them, and therefore you may not get the exact layout you want.

Floating pictures are a different story. Floating pictures can do just that—float. Also, the picture can be formatted so that text floats around the picture. To control the floating behavior of the pictures, Word provides an anchor that indicates a point in the document with which the picture is associated. You can see these anchors by displaying the Word Options dialog box, clicking Display, and making sure the Object Anchors check box is selected. When you subsequently click on a floating picture, you will see an actual anchor character at the point in your document where the selected picture is anchored.

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This post is excerpted with permission from Word.Tips.Net

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