The Problem:
The lads in the Sales department put together a nice brochure, complete with graphics they'd borrowed from the manufacturer's web site. They cropped the graphics in Word so that the manufacturer's name was hidden. But when the VP accidentally reset one of the graphics on his copy of the brochure, the manufacturer's name popped up, and the trouble started.
The Solution:
The fix is simple enough: don't crop graphics in Word! If you need to make sure that a part of a graphic isn't visible in your document, crop the graphic before putting it into Word. Word's "cropping" just hides the specified amount at the edge of the picture.
Any graphics application worth having can crop pictures. (Even Paint, which is arguably barely worth having, can do rudimentary cropping: choose Image » Attributes and enter smaller measurements to crop parts of the south and east edges off a graphic.) The freeware IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com) offers good cropping, along with a wealth of other features.
Get Rid of the Drawing Canvas
The Problem:
When I click the icon to create a text box in the Mac version of Word, I get a nice, discreet box that I can resize as needed. But when I ask Word XP for a text box, it creates a half-page-sized box that takes over the document, and I have to spend a fair amount of time resizing the box and reformatting the text to get everything under control.
The Solution:
Welcome to the Drawing Canvas, Word 2003 and Word XP's tool for helping you put together drawings consisting of AutoShapes. Word 2000 doesn't offer this annoyanceand, as you've discovered, neither do Word X and Word 2004 for the Mac.
To turn off the Drawing Canvas, choose Tools » Options, click the General tab, and uncheck the "Automatically create drawing canvas when inserting AutoShapes" box. You should then get a more manageable text box when you click the Text Box button on the Drawing toolbar.