Cannot align objects in a drawing canvas

Oups! Almost all align commands... The "Distribute horizontally" and "Distribute vertically" commands do not work with Selected objects, although they work with Drawing zone. One can only hope that Microsoft will fix this mess soon...

I was waiting to get my new computer to install Office 2010. For those of you like me who are new to Word 2010: all the align commands do not work for drawings on a canvas. This is not a new feature of Word 2010, it is a bug that Microsoft still has not fixed. The VBA code of Masashi Nezumiya is excellent and very short. This makes me wonder that it may not have taken very long for Microsoft to fix this bug…

All my documents are presently in Word 2007 format. Until the bug is fixed, here is what I suggest. With Word 2010, open a document that was created with Word 2007. This allows editing the document in a compatibility mode where all the align commands work just like in Word 2007. To keep the document in this compatibility mode, select the “Compatility with previous Word versions” which appears towards to bottom of the “Save as” window. Word 2010 remembers this selection, so you don’t have to worry even if you do a simple “Save”. When the align bug will eventually get fixed, the documents can then be upgraded to the full-fledged Word 2010 format.

By the way, a new feature of Word 2010 is the replacement of the excellent free shape line of Word 2007 by the doubtful diagonal-in-a-box. Probably, another reason to stay with the compatibility mode.

Note that the Word command phrases that I am using may not be exact because I work in a French environment, but I trust that you will understand.

I am a professor at the School of High Technology in Montreal, Canada. I agree with all previous comments. I have used Word for years to prepare my lecture notes and for all my technical reports. The majority of our students use Word for their masters and PhD theses.

All these documents include numerous technical sketches which presentation must be careful and precise. The fact that objects cannot be aligned on canvas in Word 2010 makes this version virtually unusable for engineering documents most of which contain figures.

On its web page "Add a drawing to a document - Applies to: Microsoft Word 2010" :

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/add-a-drawing-to-a-document-HA010370564.aspx?CTT=1

Microsoft announces that objects can be aligned on a canvas : "Align the objects on the canvas. To align the objects, press and hold CTRL while you select the objects that you want to align. In the Arrange group, click Align to choose from an assortment of alignment commands."

Obviously, Microsoft suggests that objects can be aligned… but it has to work!

Masashi Nezumiya, thank you for your code.

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...

I have written some tiny code to avoid this issue.

With this code you can align items on the canvas.

I hope this will be some help for someone.

http://nezumiya.net/en/archives/66

This a awesome! I don't know how I missed this post until now. Thank you!