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My two cents: your inline image is acting funny. I would try to open the document on a different machine, to understand whether it's a corrupt document or a corrupt Word installation.

David, go to the medicine cabinet, reach for the valium, then stop trying to drag and drop. It doesn't work that way. Create a line for the image by hitting "enter" a couple of times. When you've identified the line for the image, highlight it and center it. Then hit "insert" from the menu. Click on picture. Find the little sucker, and hit open. Presto, the graphic will be where you want it. By this time the valium will be working, and you'll feel all better about yourself.

There's this radical new technology the kids are using called "HTLM" or something like that, that lets you put images *exactly* where you want them. You can make the text flow around them or not, have them in a fixed place on the screen, all sorts of cool tricks.

Gaspar, I've had this problem with Word since it went wysiwyg. Of course, my corruption may be long term as well.

Terry, tried that many times. Does not work. At least not for me.

Tim, I've seen this HTML you talk about, but it will never catch on.

BTW, I'm getting ready to try (again) doing most of my work on Linux, while maintaining a Windows machine for games and for apps that don't yet exist on Linux. Open Office, here I come!

Also, don't tell anyone, but I'm going to give my Powerbook to my daughter because it will suit her more than it suits me. One reason I haven't yet is that I'm dreading writing the post explaining why.

Hi David,

Been there, done that:
1) put the pointer on top of the image
2) click the right button
3) select "Image format" (or something like that, I'm writing this with a Word 2003 - Spanish)
4) go to the "Design" tab
5) Press the "Advanced" button
6) Press the "Image position" button
Here you have the options to control the image position and its behaviour.

Sure, it should be simpler.

Hope it helps,

David

I'm with Mr Bray, I write in HTML these days, or in plain text and add markup later.

I'm with Terry. This is incredibly simple and works with every version of Word I can recall, but at least back to Office 97.

If highlighting your image and centering it isn't working, somethings corrupt in your installation. You can flow the text around both side if you want, but what you describe has never been a problem on any machine I've seen or used.

Remember MS wants to make your life so easy that you may be overthinking the whole process.

Interesting. It has NOT worked for me since before office '97. And, yes, Word has corrupted files of mine -- having too many back-and-forths tracking changes is a good way to corrupt a file -- but if Word is routinely corrupting files, then that's another problem.

David, I am familiar with the settings in the layout dialogues and had tried what you suggest. I still can't predict where the graphic will show up and I still get the weird transparency problem. In this case, I've tried both a gif and jpg version. In neither case was there any transparency set for the image - you can't even set transparency in jpgs, afaik.

Still, if I'm the only who has problem positioning graphics, and in particular, if I'm the only one whose graphics routinely escape up to the top of the page, then it's something about me. Ignorance or karma. OR both.

Also, fwiw, I do a fair bit of html authoring, but there are some features word processors are better at than DreamWeaver 8. "Track changes" is one.

Warning: I seem to recall my wife struggling with this same issue in OpenOffice.

Prince XML will translate HTML to PDF, for a mere $350. (How do you tell it things like the format of running page headers? With CSS, of course.)

And there's always TeX.....

David, I was able to reproduce your problem by setting the document line spacing to "exactly" 12p.
To correct it, I placed the graphic as inline object in a new paragraph with line spacing set to "single".

My Word is in Italian so I hope I guessed the English menu items.

Funny, I can get it to work in Word 2000. In that version, I use Format Picture, Layout tab, select a Wrapping Style (I use tight), Horizonal Alignment center, then select the Advanced button, choose the horizonal and vertical alignment (unclick Move Object with Text to get a precise alignment, or do it relative to the anchor paragraph), then select the Text Wrapping tab, Wrapping Style Top and Bottom. A bit complicated, I agree, but it works just fine.

Yes, that is a wondefully strange rant there, David! Here's what I did with my Office 2000, to be sure that I wasn't dreaming that it was too easy:

1] New Document
2] Copy and paste a bunch of text from another file
3] Put the cursor somewhere in the middle of the text
4] Copy your image of the bad image placement
5] Paste it into my document

It went right where I pasted it and stayed there.
Very odd!

Oh, and I wanted to add that in fact, HTML is *not* for placing images exactly where you want them. And it has driven people crazy for years, hence the use of tables and strange blank image spacers and the like. HTML was supposed to be an easy format, but leaving most of the choices to the browser. But it has since evolved into something much more strict. But I still wouldn't want to use it for rigid page layout.

I've had that problem for ages with Word; mostly when I've done some deleting 6 pages away or sometihng, and it affects it.

What I've found to work though is to create a single celled table at the point I want it, and dump the image in that. It seems to be much happier at keeping tables in place than Images.

I've had that problem for ages with Word; mostly when I've done some deleting 6 pages away or sometihng, and it affects it.

What I've found to work though is to create a single celled table at the point I want it, and dump the image in that. It seems to be much happier at keeping tables in place than Images.

By the way, that's in Word, as .doc, not as .html - I very rarely use Word HTML, it's pretty naff HTML!

Well, OK, lets say HTML+ CSS for clarity there. That does in fact beg the question, Tim.
Could OpenOffice use HTML+CSS as a default file fromat instead of the rococo formats that Word and OpenOffice do end up using?

I've noticed this behavior as well, but found that if you put the image in a cell in a table, it doesn't wander.

Have you tried this?
1) Move your mouse over the picture; (click once to select picture, though this might be optional)
2) Right-click; choose Format Picture (or choose from menu 'Format'-->Picture)
3) From the 'Format Picture' window, click on the 'Layout' Tab. I think what you want is 'Tight'.
Does it work now?

I don't remember having these layout problems with WOrd 3, but maybe I wasn't trying to do anything complicated. I remember being relatively happy with that version, and being annoyed with all the assumptions subsequent versions have been about how I want to organize stuff on the page/screen.

Dr. D, you need a Word Doctor!
You wrote:
"Still, if I'm the only who has problem positioning graphics,..."

Are you kidding? I could write a book if I had kept track of all the kooky and maddening problems people (whether pleading or bursting veins) bring to me. Solutions are often convoluted, sometimes astonishingly petty and small, and periodically miraculous (i.e, magically disappeared).

To use MS products, one must think MS (no, not Multiple Sclerosis). Think: Average people are essentially incapable or too lazy to make their own decisions, so the default is what we (MS app creators) decide FOR THEM.

That said, consider trying these:
- Check that all your "auto" settings are turned off (unless you really need them and are sure they're harmless). Auto stuff is buried multiple places -- deep, obscured, and labyrinthian.

- Create table (as mentioned above) is often a good solution. This is especially good for keeping captions attached to their imgs. Just make sure that you insert more paragraph (carriage) returns around it than you ever thought was necessary.

- Are you sure that settings for widow/orphan control or "keep-together" or even style settings are not overriding your current aim? (That's what img_2 looks like.)

- "Centered" is relative. It relies on your document settings/margins to find the middle (ah, life is soooo unfair when it comes to middle, center, average, median, mean, majority...;)

- Face it, sometimes MS just gets flomished (sp?) or irritated and vengeful. Especially with heavily formatted, long docs. (Options: Quark? Pagemaker? FrameMaker?... depends on what kind of length/precision you need.) If your MS app has "had enough," sometimes the only alternative is to...
Select All -> Copy
Save as text in new app (SimpleText, TextEdit, NotePad ->
Select All -> Copy
Paste the unformatted text into a new blank (Word) doc (watch out for those we're-smarter-than-you default/auto settings)
Apply your Styles and other parameters, and watch things jump around -> you may see what's forcing yr img out of bounds or w/o wrap.

Sounds long? The strategy is simple: Force MS to lose its memory that there was ever a problematic doc. Sometimes, you can fool MS apps by using Save As, renaming it so it doesn't make the connection, and occasionally magic occurs.

I prefer the "write as text, format later" strategy, per Bray and Marks. And after two decades as an editor (currently unemployed, partly because MS has made it so ez that anywho kan creete a perfeshunal uh paper-thingy), the first thing I do with a text is remove all images/styles and save it as text. But then I'm an early and still-devoted Mac user (multiplatformal only when mandatory), so...

Lastly, how about saying a little prayer when you drag and place the img? That works for phones in Egypt ;)

Can't say I've used that feature -- but Word has plenty of other problems. Even in Edit:Find! See my A Tool for Thought Declines.

Regards,

Uriel

I have this exact same problem, and I'm googling trying to find a $!$%@#$% solution. I don't want to use the in-line option, although I understand how that is a possibility. I want the WRAPPING to work like it should. Does ANYONE know how to fix this?

My mistake was that I had the line spacing set to an absolute amount. Word was doing its best to put a 3" graphic onto a line that I'd constrained to be 0.25" high.

I had the same problem and googling found your post. Setting line space to relative works fine, thanks.

Just found your blog and reading it kept me from going completely nuts about my Word document. I still haven't found a solution to one of my problems though, perhaps somebody is up to the challenge: I am trying to insert images with legends in a document with two columns. I figured that the best way was to open a text block and insert the image and the figure legend, that way they stay together and the position is somewhat flexible (unlike a table). The problem: when such an image has the length of a complete column (i.e. no regular text should be above or below, only in the other column), one single line of regular text just remains in the column. It even disappears behind the image even though I chose wrapping that should prevent text to be behind the image. I can't seem to get that line to reunite with the rest of the text, even though I unchecked orphan and widow control.
Any suggestions are welcome!

Sorry -- but Word's handling of images is insane. Do these people ever use their own software? Why do images jump around all over the place, no matter which of the 200 combinations of layout settings I use? And who really understands Word's obscure layout jargon? In ClarisWorks version 1 (Feb 1992) -- which still runs fine under Classic on a pre-Intel Mac -- I can place images where I want and they stay put. I'm sure the MS programmers are very clever people. Its a shame they are content to impose their cleverness on the rest of us.

I had the same problem, turning off "move picture with text" solved the problem; ie

1) right click on picture,
2) select "format picture",
3) select "layout" tab,
4) select "advanced" button,
5) select "picture position" tab,
6) untick "move object with text".

As commented above, it seems rather a complicated way to stop Word doing something you couldn't possibly want it to do, ie put pictures on top of your headers/on the wrong page/outside of the printable area of the page!!!

Thank goodness I found this. For 5 hours, I've thought I was losing my mind as pictures just went beserk. I had created a style where the spacing used "exactly." and when I inserted a picture, put a caption below it and then went to group them, everything went haywire. I've been experimenting with several of your solutions and I think the single cell table will work for me. I agree, isn't there a simpler way to design this!!!

Thank goodness I found this. For 5 hours, I've thought I was losing my mind as pictures just went beserk. I had created a style where the spacing used "exactly." and when I inserted a picture, put a caption below it and then went to group them, everything went haywire. I've been experimenting with several of your solutions and I think the single cell table will work for me. I agree, isn't there a simpler way to design this!!!

what does the term "wrap" mean in microsoft word?

Hey guys, nice comments and I notice, no real solutions. I've learned over the years to be wary of trusting Word with lots of inserted pics. I format them tight, not to move with text, but they still move about. Sometimes I can get them to calm down and stay in place. The fewer pics the better. I tried your suggesion in a table, but they can't be resized, which is a good thing with simple pictures. If a have a few to insert I add a bunch of pages with page breaks or lines, to make space for the images that otherwise just pile on top of each other and disappear into corners etc. This is amazing. Would be hilarious if not such a piss-off. Good luck.

Martin,

I have been writing 10+ page reports for more than 10 years and this has bugged me for as long as I could remember... but only for say 1 picture in 8 and I have never been able to find out why. [Reading this thread: I checked line spacing was already single and not moving with text didn't help.]

However, thanks for the tight hint... tight with a bunch of carriage returns was the magic for me, it is something I would never try as I KNEW I didn't want tight: text around the sides.

Word has been corrupting my tables, I am using 2 different PCs and working on the same long document. Is this a problem with a PC or with the Program. Has anyone had this problem before and if so how do you fix it?