Cannot align objects in a drawing canvas

Anonymous
2010-07-08T15:31:05+00:00

I have several clipart objects in a drawing canvas and I want to align them with each other and within the canvas. The alignment options are all greyed out regardless of whether I have "align to page" or "align to canvas" selected.

This happens in Word 2010 on both Windows 7 and Windows Vista

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Anonymous
2010-09-02T09:38:03+00:00

Summarising:

1 - Inside the canvas you cannot align objects

2 - You have to move object outside the canvas in order to align them, BUT:

3 - Outside the canvas you cannot use connectors...

A bit frustrating for people who work every single day with word...

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  1. Anonymous
    2010-10-04T10:54:33+00:00

    I totally agree. A very big pain in the neck. The only suggestion I have is to prepare the document in Publisher, the alignment works there though some of the shape functionality isn't as good as in the Drawing Canvas (e.g. U-turn block arrows) and copy it across as I have been doing, though I do accept a lot of people will not have access to Publisher.

    Is this another attempt by Microsoft to get corporations to buy more products?

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  2. Anonymous
    2010-11-07T00:02:57+00:00

    I have spent a lot of time trying to make this alignment and ditribution in a canvas work, until I ran across this thread. Thank you Laurie_g, for pointing this out - at least, now I know it is not me being not smart enough to do it, but actually this is an MS's fault. 

    So far, I found the only "workaround" that is embedding a PowerPoint 2010 slide object frame instead of a native canvas, it is not as seamless, though, but the drawing tools look the same as Word's, and the alignment and other stuff seem to work.

    It is frustrating, that Microsoft does not bother to fix the issue promptly.

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  3. Anonymous
    2010-11-08T02:39:23+00:00

    yes, the canvas in 2010 is quite disappointing. I am really hoping that MS will come up with a fix for this. Needless to say my documents are not looking as sharp as they should because I am 'eyeballing' the alignment these days. If you insert the objects without using a canvas you can align them to each other but will need to group them to keep them together. Sort of defeats the whole purpose of using a canvas.

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  4. Anonymous
    2010-12-14T18:37:31+00:00

    I wanted to echo "Some.Guy" and thank Laurie_g; I've been frustrated by why the Align Objects options were grayed out.  Just got rid of the canvis and lone and behold they work.

    I agree with you Laurie; the eyeballing is a sad state of affairs and hopefully MS will get this fixed soon (though as the thread shows, this has been out there awhile).

    Jeffrey W. Cox

    www.JeffreyWCox.com

    www.ImproveGroup.net

    www.FixYourToDoList.com

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