RogBlog

I recently have had occasion to write a Microsoft Word 2008 document with floating figures. This has been a rather harrowing experience. Two useful pieces of advice for those of you out there struggling with it:

1. If you create a caption, you can group the figure with its caption as you would two objects in PowerPoint.  This keeps the two together.  However, you cannot do this with tables.  (Don’t ask me whose bright idea this must have been.)
2. Word doesn’t have real floats.  The closest approximation is wrapping text around the figure.  You can access this with Format Object -> Layout.  There are extra options (e.g., Top and Bottom wrapping style, which is decent) hidden under Advanced.
3. While you’re in Format Object -> Layout, you can get better control over the figure’s positioning using Picture Position options than you can by dragging the figure around with the mouse.  For example, selecting Vertical Alignment to Top relative to Margin is basically the best way of demanding float to top.  Note that this doesn’t seem to keep the figure there reliably if you edit the preceding text.
4. Doing this kind of figure stuff can wreak havoc with formatting of later text, causing bizarre early page breaks and such.  You can undo some of this bizarreness by selecting the text after the pagebreak, selecting Format -> Paragraph | Line and Page Breaks, and unchecking some of the boxes including Keep with Next, Page break before, Keep lines together.  Which ones to uncheck?  Trial and error.
5. After you have done this, ask yourself a hard question: why are you using this shoddy, poor excuse for document-production software?  Consider switching to LaTeX.