Phantom text boxes

Question

I deleted a text box in a Word 2010 document. The text box and text disappeared. One of the words in the text was "Parker." To be sure the name "Parker" didn't occur in the document, I used the Find feature to find "Parker" and the result was "1 match"

• contained in the text box on page 1 (the same text box I already deleted), and the original text box displayed in the Find results, even though there was no trace of it on page 1. I finally tried deleting all of the text on page 1 including the Section Break, and that did solve the problem - a search for "Parker" netted "no matches"). Why would deleted text appear in a Find search? I wonder if I need to search for all key terms ever contained in a deleted text box to be sure the text really is permanently deleted.

Answer 1

Since you deleted a section break, you may also have deleted header or footer content, where a text box could have been anchored. (Headers and footers are stored in section breaks.) It's difficult to tell now that you have deleted the break.

What you can do is check if you see the problem in some other document. In other words, can it be reproduced?

Answer 2

Hi Gregorie,

Thank you for posting on Microsoft Office Word Community.

We tried to reproduce the issue on our end and it works correctly.

Ideally, this is not supposed to happen this way in Word 2010. It would be very difficult to generalize what could have conflict to result in this issue.

So I request you try to reproduce the issue in a different new document and check if the same issue persists.

Thank you.