How do I permanently stop an image from moving in Word on macOS?

Question

I am using Microsoft Word 2019 (16.67) on macOS Monterey (12.6.1).

I don’t know if this is a bug in Word for Mac, or if Microsoft somehow considers this a ‘feature’, but it is bloody annoying…

I have a long document with lots of images, most of which are inline (text wrapping set to “In line with text”). A few need to be absolutely positioned on the page, however. These have their text wrapping set to “Top and bottom”.

Here is an example of how their positioning options might look:

This works and positions the image exactly where I want it: 2 cm from the top of the page, centred inside the text margins, fixed, not moving with the text.

The trouble is that, seemingly quite at random, these settings are all undone by Word.

For example, if a heading gets a page break before it somewhere (doesn’t matter where – before or after any of the images), then all the absolutely positioned images in the entire document have their position changed. For the screenshot above, the change would result in:

• Horizontal changes to “Absolute position [xx cm] to the right of Margin”
• Vertical changes to “Absolute position [5 cm] below Page”
• Lock anchor is disabled
• Move object with text is enabled

Note that in the GUI, setting the vertical position to “Absolute position below Page” automatically disables “Move object with text”, so I can’t even create a screenshot with these settings – they’re not normally possible to set. But somehow both are selected whenever this auto-change thing happens.

I’ve noticed that this happens most consistently whenever

• the document text reflows, especially if the reflow causes the document to become a page longer or shorter
• the document is closed and reopened

But it happens randomly as well. Sometimes, while the program is just sitting there and I’m not even interacting with it, it will suddenly hang for about 20 or 30 seconds, and then afterwards the absolutely positioned images are all screwed up… again.

Is there some way to make Word understand that I want my settings to stay as they are, no matter what?

Answer 1

Not sure there is a way to do this using the standard positioning dialogs.

Your best bet may be to work around the problem by insert the image in a header or footer (i.e. so it is anchored to a paragraph in the header) - you can still position it where you want in the page, but it shouldn't be affected by what happens in the document body.

To ensure it only appears on one page, you would probably have to put the relevant page in a Word section of its own and define suitable headers for that section and the surrounding sections. That may introduce other layout problems. Another possibility that would avoid sections might be to insert field coding like this in the header (let's say you want the image on Page 10):

{ IF { PAGE } = 10 "¶
" }¶

All the { } have to be the special field brace pairs you can insert using command/cmd-F9 or fn-command/cmd-F9 on macOS. The ¶ are the normal paragraph marks you'll see if you Show formatting marks.

Then anchor the image to the paragraph that starts with ". That may be tricky because Word becomes reluctant to display the anchor in this situation, but it seems to be possible to do it by moving the image around.

Not nice, but if there's no other way it may do the trick.