Remove Text Boxes, keep the text

J

JPh12

Some Pdf-to-Word/RTF converters produce documents with hundreds of tex
boxes that each contain a piece of the text.

Rather than laboriously extracting their content one box at a time, i
there a way to automatically remove all the boxes and keep the text (I'
using Word 2003)
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

If they're really text boxes, your best bet is a macro, but if in fact
they're frames, then Ctrl+A, Ctrl+Q will usually remove them (since a frame
is part of paragraph formatting and Ctrl+Q will remove it unless it's
defined in the paragraph style). In either case, however, the text box or
frame is going to be anchored to an ordinary text paragraph, and the order
of the paragraphs when text boxes or frames are removed will depend on the
order in which they were anchored. This can mean that the text will become
jumbled.

If they are in fact text boxes, and if you have Word 2003 or earlier, you
have one option that is not available in Word 2007 or 2010. On the Text Box
tab of the Format Text Box dialog, there is an option to Convert to Frame.
Once you've converted the text box to a frame, you can remove it as above.
If you had to do this for every text box, that wouldn't be very helpful,
but, as it happens, once you've done one, you can select another and press
F4 (Repeat), then another, F4, and so on until you're done. Once all the
text boxes have been converted to frames, then Ctrl+A, Ctrl+Q will remove
them.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org
 

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