I'm editing some biographies for a museum and need to have each one about 25 lines long to fit the space on a banner. Is there a way to build a box or table that would cut me off at 25 lines? I'm using Word 2000, Windows 98 and I'm typing with Times New Roman 12. Thanks.

I'm not a MS Word guru, but you could try using a text box (from the Insert menu, choose Text Box). Size it by dragging its corner with the mouse so it's 25 lines long and however wide you need.

It won't prevent you from entering more text than you want, but it will at least make it visually obvious when you've reached your limit.

Hope that helps.

Great answer from Professor. If you like, you can download a Sample.doc. This file has a text box with 25 lines, and Times New Roman, font size 12.

The text box is sized so that if you add more lines, you will not see them without increasing the size of the box. You can replace the meaningless text with your text, then add or remove lines as necessary.

You can format the text box by right clicking on one of the box boarders and choosing "Format Text Box" from the right click menu. You can make the box lines invisible in the format text box window too, if you like.

And, by-the-way...you can create random text by typing (in MS Word) the line:

=rand()

Then press the enter key. You can put this into a text box and type in: =rand(5)
to get exactly 25 lines of random text. They will grouped in 5 paragraphs of 5 lines each. Use the Find/Replace tool to add a new paragraph marker at the end of the line (like this).

Edit menu -->Find/Replace tool.

Find: dog. (Note, that is "dog. " with a space following the period mark).
Replace: dog.^p (carat symbol and the p must be lower case.)

Then click "Replace All".

The words "dog." will be added, and a new paragraph will be created at the end of each line.

I hope this is of some help!
Dwight