Text box contents disappear

There is a text box setting that will produce that magical "Now you see it, now you don't" effect: Placeholder.

Select a textbox in the flow, Right Click (or Control Click) and choose Format Shape. In the left column, click on Layout, then on the Advanced button. In the tab at the top, select Position and make sure Placeholder is not selected. This will deselect the setting for all linked textboxes.

There is also a chance that you may have defined those settings as the default for all new text boxes. If that is the case, right click on a "good" shape and select Set as default textbox.

The overlay setting had no effect here.

I did notice this: when moving objects on top of one another (allow overlapping should be on, to avoid jerking), Word gets confused as to what it should show on top and hides the text in some of the textboxes. As you mentioned, undoing sometimes restores the correct view, sometimes not. The blank text boxes would not respond to Bring to front/Send to back.

Once a texbox became blank, I could not restore the proper view by changing individual parameters either, so I concluded that such blank boxes are caused by the interaction of different text box settings.

I solved the problem by making sure all text boxes had the same settings. To do this, Shift-click on all of them, then do Format > Object and apply identical wrapping styles (Tight, Through, whatever) and options (like Allow overlap) to all of them.

That should make them behave correctly. At least, that's what happened here. After they are correctly positioned on the page, then try changing their individual options if you need to.

Thanks for the suggestion, Daniel.

I looked, and Placeholder was not selected, so that wasn't it. The box for Wrap text within text boxes for overlay objects was selected, and I am trying unchecking that to see if it makes any difference. (I don't have any overlay objects.)

Ian

Here's a wrinkle on this now-you-see-it thing:

Working on a project with several people. In order to keep figures & textboxes together, several are inserted in a Drawing Canvas, in the Windows version of MS Word.  Everything appears OK on the Mac except that textboxes in one canvas object are filled with text, all others appear blank.  Resize the canvas with text visible, and text disappears from all boxes in that canvas, but another canvas's textboxes become visible.

I tested this copying & pasting one whole canvas multiple times, so all would have identical settings. same thing.  The figures were pasted in as enhanced metafiles (again, in a windows environment), and there are no problems whatsoever - they always appear and are movable, etc. Text boxes are editable, at least when text is visible.

However, if I move each canvas to its own page then text becomes visible.  Apparently, only one canvas per page is allowed to have visible text on the Mac. 

Windows version, no problems.  Anyone have ANY ideas or suggestions?

You are a genius.  Pamphlet due tonight for school project, and you saved my life.  I cannot thank you enough.  Though I was gonna have to retype the whole blessed thing...