See: http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/MarginalText.htm

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP


wrote in message
oups.com...
Hi,

I'm laying out a long report (~120 pages) in Word and would like to
set
up what I call "side boxes", though I don't know the official
typographical name for them. For an example of what I'm talking
about,
look at this document:
http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2..._chapter_5.pdf
on page 158 (11), look at Box 5.3.

I will probably have 20 boxes in the document overall.

So, I have a couple of questions on how to set this up.
1) Would you recommend "floating" the boxes, and if so, how? I
would
love something similar to Latex, where I could just place the box in
the text, and Word would move the box up or down on the page as
necessary and flow text around it, filling in above or below as
necessary. However, I'd also want to be able to reference the box
numbers with cross-references.

2) For now, I have set up the boxes as two styles: 1 style for the
heading and box title, and another style for the box text - these
both
have background shading, borders, and different fonts to set the box
off from the rest of the text.

This seems to work ok except for tables - when I insert a table into
the middle of the box text style (which has shading and borders),
the
box text style stops and the table is left in the middle, without
the
shading or borders of the surrounding style. How can I rectify
this?
For example, if I place a photo inline it seems to work fine, but
a table does not - is it some sort of magical object?

It kinda looks like this
----------------
| box text |
| box text |
----------------
--------
|table |
--------
----------------
| box text |
| box text |

I'd like the table to be inside the box, if that makes sense.

3) What is the official "typographical" name for these things?

thanks,
karl