The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

How to center text in Word?

Is it possible in MS Word to create a textbox whose text is centered horizontally -and- vertically? I can't for the life of me figure out how. After scouring Google, i found a hack about creating a one-cell table inside the textbox, which looked good onscreen but not when printed.

Mike Schiraldi
Thursday, May 27, 2004

In Word 2003,
File > Page Setup > Layout (tab) > Vertical alignment

also take a look at,
File > Page Setup > Layout (tab) > Apply to

Green Pajamas
Thursday, May 27, 2004

No, i don't want to center the textbox on the page.. I want to center the text within the textbox.

Mike Schiraldi
Thursday, May 27, 2004

You can highlight the cell, right-click, and from the list of 9 different cell-alignments choose the one that is centered both vertically and horizontally. If you don't have enough space above and below your text then change the row-height; text will remain in vertical-center of the table cell. You will want to avoid inserting manual carriage-returns on lines that had no text; if you were experimenting with that to center things vertically then delete the superfluous carriage-returns.

Herbert Sitz
Thursday, May 27, 2004

Sorry, things may be complicated because you're using a textbox. If you want to center things within the textbox then do as I said with table formatting in earlier message, except set your table's row height to be equal to the height of your textbox. This gives will center things vertically inside the textbox.

Herbert Sitz
Thursday, May 27, 2004

works for me:
return
return
return
return
return
space space space space space space

:-)

( o ) ( o )
Thursday, May 27, 2004

Herbert: Thanks for the tips. How exactly do i "set [my] table's row height to be equal to the height of [my] textbox"? If i manually set it, and then resize the textbox, the table's size does not change.

If i don't fix that, although it looks fine onscreen, it will not print correctly -- the table is the size it was when it was created, but it is cropped to only show the upper-left-hand corner of it that fits inside the textbox, which usually means a blank textbox.

So i have to go and manually resize all my textboxes all the time.

Anyway, i've moved to PowerPoint for this. i can get my work done, but i've since discovered a better illustration of the problem i was having:

1. Go to PowerPoint.

2. Make a big circle.

3. Type an "X" into it. It will be centered horizontally and vertically.

4. Copy the shape, and paste it into Word.

5. Word's version will have the X in the upper-left.

Mike Schiraldi
Thursday, May 27, 2004

"So i have to go and manually resize all my textboxes all the time."

Yes, I think so. Either the textbox or the table's row height, take your pick. You can avoid resizing if you create original textbox/table cell with plenty of padding so that things still look fine if you add a row or two of text.

I don't really think this is a reason to get upset at the functionality of MS Word. Presumably you're using textboxes so you have flexibility to move the snippets of text around and place them at an absolute position anywhere you want on the page. To be fair, this is more of a desktop publishing function than a word processing function. What's surprising is not that Word doesn't do it without a little bit of manual tweaking, but that Word is able to do it as well as it does at all.

Herbert Sitz
Thursday, May 27, 2004

Have the textbox with no borders. Put the borders on the one-celled table. The table will expand with the text. Make the textbox nice and big and have it set to go under the text so you can type over the blank bits.

What you're doing is a kludge because Word is not a DTP editor. But I would ask yourself why you need to use textboxes in the first place. Borderless tables are fine for much set up in Word, as they are in HTML.

If it looks fine on screen but doesn't print well, then consider converting the file to a .pdf file first (there are plenty of free converters) and then printing.

Stephen Jones
Thursday, May 27, 2004

Do it by selecting "Resize Autoshape to fit text" and setting the internal margins equal.