Understanding images: Staying in position

Sometimes, especially when you are trying to create a one-page flyer, you want to position a figure in a certain spot on the page and make sure it stays put.  One way to do this is to use the Position menu on the Format ribbon to align your figure with one of nine common locations on the page:

Choosing one of the options from the With Text Wrapping section to position your figure will do three things:

1. Switch your figure from inline to floating.
2. Apply square text wrapping.
3. Position the figure relative to the document's margins.

The third item in the list is the key (and what makes this menu different from the Wrap Text menu). To understand what it means, let's go back to my previous post when I explained the relationship between a figure and its anchor.

In that post, I mentioned that the figure will move when the text it is anchored to moves. This is because, by default, a figure is positioned relative to the text where it is anchored. In most cases, since there tends to be a relationship between the text and the figure, this is exactly what you want to happen.

Let’s look at an example. In the document below, I inserted a picture to go along with the family newsletter I’m writing. The picture is related to the third paragraph, where you see the anchor icon:

If I later add another paragraph (the blue text), which pushes the text and anchor to the next page, the picture also moves to the next page. Once there, it maintains the same position relative to the location of the anchor – in this case, about an inch down from the top of the paragraph:

When a figure’s position is relative to the margins, which happens when you use the Position menu, it won’t move on the page as the anchor moves. But if the anchor is pushed to the next page, the figure will still jump to the next page (see rule #1 in the last post). When that happens, the figure remains in the same relative position on that next page. 

Continuing with the example above, if the picture was originally positioned relative to the margins on page 1,  when I insert the blue text and push the figure to page 2, the result would look like this:

Notice that the picture keeps its relative position on the page, in the lower-right corner, when it moves to the next page.

If you want to see exactly how your figure is positioned and whether it will move with the text it’s anchored to or will stay in a fixed position on the page, you can look at the Advanced Layout dialog box. At the bottom of the Position menu, select More Layout Options. On the Position tab in the dialog box, you’ll see several options for aligning a figure vertically and horizontally. At the bottom of the dialog box is an option called Move with Text. Try  selecting and clearing that option and watch how the settings above are changed to enable that behavior. 

--Theresa Estrada is a program manager on the Word team who spends most of her days (and some nights) studying how users work with figures in their documents.