Hands on: How to manipulate Word's text boxes

To make the process as painless as possible, and the result as elegant, draw the first box and from the Colours and Lines tab of the Format dialogue box, select ‘no line’. Next, hold down the Ctrl key and drag the box over to the right ­ you’ll get a second box identical in size and formatting to the first. Don’t bust a gut trying to get them exactly aligned at the top, as there’s an easy way to do this ­ select both boxes as described above, then from the Drawing toolbar Draw menu, choose Align or Distribute, Align Top.

Now group them as before, so you can move the double box around the page and resize it to balance the columns so that they both contain the same number of lines.

If you want to surround both columns with a border line, then don’t use the line command from the Drawing toolbar, as this produces an unsightly line between the two columns. Instead use the Rectangle drawing tool to surround both boxes, then set that rectangle to have no fill.

Jiggle the size until it looks right, then repeat the Group command to include the rectangle. Once again, you’ll be able to move the grouped items as a single item, and then fine-tune the size to get perfectly balanced columns.

For those using Word 2007, I’m not going to go through it all again, but here’s a quick survival guide. You create text boxes from the Text Box Gallery on the Insert ribbon. The gallery contains a variety of ready-made boxes that may or may not suit or your needs, so you might prefer to use the ‘Draw text box’ command at the bottom of the gallery, which performs the same as in previous versions. As with Word 2003, you can right-click to link and format them.

Alternatively, you can format a text box from the Text Box Tools, Formatting ribbon that appears when you create or select a box. The Select tool is hidden away at the right-hand end of the Home ribbon ­ Select, Select Objects. However, holding down Ctrl and then selecting multiple objects by clicking on them with the Text Box Tools Format ribbon active is much easier than the equivalent in 2003 or earlier.

To align text boxes with each other, select them both, then look carefully in the Arrange section of the Text Box Tools, Format ribbon ­ it’s the tiny unlabelled icon at the top right. Group is just below it.