Forum Discussion
Office 365 Word cannot resize or rotate inserted shapes or items
Your workaround works! Strangely, when selecting another shape, the placeholders do not change to the new selected shape, the previous shape still shows as selected or no shape shows a selected. Then, for example, if you delete by using backspace, word deletes the shape that is not shown as selected. This is getting silly, Office (365 or otherwise) is quite expensive for us. It's a basic feature - write some text, draw some rectangles.
- Why are you using documents in doc format? If you convert the document to the current format, you will have access to the full functionality offered by the current version of Office.
- We use .doc documents for filing legal briefs. We have found that .docx has too many subtle changes (see all the compatibility options in word about word 2007-2016). For example, shapes shift location and table formatting changes somewhat, even breaking new pages inadvertently. We also use commercial workflow tools for verifying our content and formatting, and these only work with .doc. The question I’m asking is does anyone know if Microsoft is officially dropping support for .doc?
- So far, there is no indication that .doc files will suffer reduced functionality:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/compat/office-file-format-reference#file-formats-that-are-supported-in-word
- My document was the newer format. My document just glitched. In experimenting I saved it as doc and opened it in an older version of Word on my old laptop, I was able to edit as normal. I saved as the newer format and opened in office 365 and it still wouldn’t work. Once I copied out of the glitched doc and pasted in a new one it worked. On a different note, I miss the features Word used to have where you could select and group pictures, shapes, and text boxes. It kept the document synced. If anyone knows a different software that allows you to do that, let me know. It is so annoying to edit something in the document on a previous line and it randomly will cause all the arrows and text boxes to get out of alignment. I spend more time fixing this than I should have to. Don’t know why the change was made, but I am not a fan.
The Group command is still available on the Shape Format tab of the ribbon
In addition, you can add the command to insert a Drawing Canvas to the Quick Access Toolbar.
However, having "compound" images in a document is a frequent cause of document corruption as a result of mis-matched XML tag errors and I recommend compiling such images in a separate document and then use a screen capture utility such as Snagit from www.techsmith.com to create a single, flat image that you can insert into your main document with its layout set so that it is In-line with text. The separate document should be retained in case it later becomes necessary to make modifications to the image.
It is possible that you will receive similar response from the Support as BartHer (see this post).
Maybe the number of your support request will be helpful for DougMVP in lobbying for fixing this bug? (See this post).
I also confirm that the workaround proposed by Jongsoo_Yoon is working in my documents.
