locking a picture to an absolute location on a page

[Mitreman]

This has been a continious problem for the 12 years I have used various
versions of MS Word.

There is no way to positino a picture, texxt box or object on a single or
multicolumn formatted page and then add another picture, text box or object
without the pictures jumping all over the page. Many of us with hundreds of
years of experience with MS word cannot male a page layout be stable.

Making MS Word do this would such an improvement that the response would be
overwhelming.

 

[Jezebel]

You can't have tried very hard. Word has plenty of shortcomings, but this
ain't one of them.

Set the picture to floating, and go to Format Picture > Layout > Advanced to
set the absolute position on the page. Set 'Allow overlap' to true, so it
doesn't get shifted by other graphics. It's also worth paying attention to
which paragraph serves as anchor. By default it's the closest paragraph, but
it's often simpler to anchor to the page heading or some other paragraph
that is less likely to get deleted or moved.

 

[DocBrown]

I think the problem Mitreman is refering to is one that has frustrated me no
end, also. When you insert or draw various drawing objects, many times they
jump to some ridiculous position off of the top of the page because the
absolute position gets set to some weird value like -9.89. If it is one
object, it can be repositioned by going to the Advanced Layout dialog box and
typing something reasonable, like 0.05 in the Absolute position. If I plan to
edit a compound object, I insure the Absolute Postion is reasonable BEFORE I
ungroup them. This seems to leave the individule Absolute postions in the
correct setting in relation to the paragraph.

The object anchor also seems to have a mind of it's own. If I drag objects,
the anchor jumps to other paragraphs for reasons I can't figure out. For
compound drawing, it seems essential to have all the objects anchored to the
same paragraph or else the jump around if they get pushed too close to the
begin and end of page.

Has anyone found a way to get Word to leave that field to some reasonable
value as the default? I sure can't figure it out.

I suspect that the annoying Drawing Canvas was someone's attempt corral
those drawing objects that wanted to jump off the top of the page.

I have other techniques I've worked out to beat Word into submission when
working with drawing objects.

John