If you have a picture exactly where you want it on a page, all you have to do is uncheck the box (or make the appropriate selection from one of the menus in Word 2013).

In earlier versions you have to go into More Layout Options|Position and check or uncheck ‘Move object with text’ – it’s checked as default. In Word 2013 ‘Move with text’ and ‘Fix position on page’ appear as options on the Wrap Text menu and on the little pop out Layout Options menu (so long as your picture isn’t in line with the text). Why do pictures move? How do I stop pictures moving?īasically, pictures can either be locked in position on the page or moved around with the text. Notice also how the Tight-wrapped text goes inside the boxes because these images have a transparent background. For example, here you can see that although the books themselves don’t overlap, the boxes round them do.

This is useful if you want to get two pictures closer together than their boundary boxes would otherwise allow. It looks complicated, but I don’t think I’ve ever, in years of creating worksheets and doing magazine layout, had to resort to changing anything in the sections labelled ‘Horizontal’ and ‘Vertical’ – I’ve just used the ‘Options’ section.īefore we go on to that though have a look at the ‘Allow overlap’ button. The other, Position, provides some detailed options for controlling where your pictures go and is the key to stopping them from jumping around. One lets you control the size of your picture, but there are easier ways to do that (see How do I change the size of pictures in Word? on my website). You may have noticed there are two other tabs in this: To control how close the text is to the edge of a picture we opened the More Layout Options window from the right click menu. Last week, we looked at the ways in which Word can wrap text around pictures. More from my own editor, Catherine Fitzsimons, creator of educational materials and community magazines, on the tricky task of controlling how images behave in Word documents …

Lock image in word