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Disabling Anchors in MS Word permanently

Anonymous
2021-08-31T14:21:52+00:00

I need to disable the anchor function in Word. I have a template I have been using for 10 years, using it yesterday afternoon. Worked great. This morning I opened the document and Word moves my photos to the upper left hand corner and anchors it there. All suggestions don't help. The anchor symbol doesn't bother, not being able to free float my pictures within a document does.

All kinds of problems have been popping up since our company moved to the cloud based office. I don't want the anchors to work at all as I can control where I want my photos to be in the document.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 322.9K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2021-09-01T08:51:37+00:00

    Another reason for using In-line text wrapping is that it greatly reduces the possibility of the document becoming corrupted as a result of miss-matched xml tag errors.

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  2. Jay Freedman 207.5K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2021-09-01T00:38:17+00:00

    The latest of the several SaveView add-ins on my site is the SaveViewLocMulti one. If you have any difficulty with the add-in, use the email address shown at https://jay-freedman.info/contact/contact.htm to reach me.

    I want to address a misconception in the original post here. All "floating" objects in Word (those that are not inline with text) must have an "anchor", which is a paragraph in the document body with which the object is associated. The anchor icon is simply an indicator of which paragraph is the anchor. The display of the icons can be turned on and off in the File > Options > Display dialog, but the anchor paragraph exists regardless of that display.

    The location of the anchor has only one effect on the location of the floating object: If the anchor paragraph moves to another page, the object will also move to that page; the object must always be on the same page as the anchor. Other than that, the object can be anywhere on the page, set by drag-and-drop or explicitly in the Picture Format > Position > More Layout Options dialog.

    Word sometimes does lose track of the correct position of the object, especially when there are multiple floating objects near or on top of each other. That's why we often recommend sticking with inline text wrapping as much as possible, using tables for positioning. When an image needs to combine several objects, it's usually best to use a graphics editor to create a single image that can then be dropped into Word.

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  3. Stefan Blom 338.7K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2021-08-31T19:51:25+00:00

    OK, so you observed the change in the local version of Word. Is there a chance that the view has changed? Make sure that you are viewing the document in Print Layout view.

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  4. Anonymous
    2021-08-31T19:17:43+00:00

    No the display doesn't change. What has changed is the formatting in Word. I used to use the text wrap "tight" to add a picture to a document I designed for making lockout tags. The anchor symbol shows up now and I can't drag and drop my picture into a specific location on the tag.

    I have looked for some way to disable the anchor function so I don't have to go back and re-work 450 tags, because whatever the update was is causing the picture to jump to the upper left-hand corner of the tag whenever I open a document even created yesterday afternoon.

    Where the yellow highlight is located was where the picture is supposed to be located. The anchor is holding it there and I want to be able to tell the program to disable the anchor object/picture function. So I can free float the picture wherever I want it in the document.

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  5. Stefan Blom 338.7K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2021-08-31T18:39:21+00:00

    Are you saying that the display changes when you are viewing the document in Word Online? In that case, this is quite common, because Word Online is limited compared to the full version of Word that you can run on a Windows or Mac computer.

    If the issue you have encountered is something different, please elaborate. A screen shot may be helpful.

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