Text overflow, autoflow, and text box linking

Today I'm going to talk about  three of concepts that cause some confusion among newer users of Publisher: text overflow and linking text boxes.

When a text box, or AutoShape for that matter, in your publication contains more text than it can display, Publisher stores the extra text in overflow. You can manually move your text out of overflow and back into your publication by autoflowing the text into another linked text box. This way you can start a story on the front page of a multipage newsletter or other publication and have the story continue on another page.

When you have too much text in a text box it changes to look like this:

The text box handles turn red and a little box with three dots (called the overflow indicator) appears in the lower right indicating that there is overflow text. You can get the text out of overflow and into your publication in two ways, you can make the text box large enough for your text to fit or you can link the text box to one or more other text boxes and have the text autoflow from one linked text box to the next. When you click on the overflow indicator your mouse cursor becomes a little pitcher:

When you move your mouse the pitcher then changes to a pouring pitcher:

You can then either click on any other empty text box, or just click on empty space to automatically create a new text box, and the overflow text autoflows into the next text box and a link is created between the boxes. Here's an example of a text box that is linked to two other text boxes:

If you clicked on the arrow in the upper left of the text box Publisher will move to the previous text box, and if you clicked on the arrow in the lower right Publisher moves to the next text box.

Once you've linked one or more text boxes you can then move the text boxes around, either on the same page or on different pages and the link between the text boxes remains intact.

For more information on overflow, autoflow, and linked text boxes:

• Get text out of overflow
• Flow pasted text to the next page or text box
• Connect text boxes

-- Bob deLaubenfels