Word 365 – hidden textbox

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I have a word document which contains two hidden text boxes which contain text. The contents appear when searched for, but are not visible on the page. In the Selection Pane the textbox is greyed out and not selectable.

I’ve tried following the guidance here: https://wordribbon.tips.net/T010074_Finding_an_Invisible_Text_Box.html
but this hasn’t fixed it.

There are other textboxes in the document I don’t want to delete, so haven’t run the 3rd option that link gives.

I have fixed this by copying all the text into a clean document but am interested if there is a better solution in case this crops up again.

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… traditionally, this is where you use another word processor with better low-level editing capabilities?

Way back when, the tool of choice for fixing malfunctioning formatting etc. was WordPerfect. Somewhat later, it may have been Lotus WordPro. WordPerfect at least is still available.

LibreOffice has never quite acquired this niche but can sometimes work for this purpose too.

In extreme cases I’ve even tweaked the underlying xml directly, but…

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