How to Remove an Anchor in Word

If you are a fan of the Microsoft Office tools, you probably use Microsoft Word to create documents. When you insert images in a Word document, you sometimes have an anchor attached to the image that gets in the way and causes problems. So you might be looking for ways to remove an anchor in Word.

This blog post covers the steps to remove an anchor in a Word document.

How to remove an anchor in Word

There are two methods with which you can remove the anchor in Word.

Method 1: Stop object anchors from showing up

If you want to remove the anchor icon, one way is to disable it in the Microsoft Word document.

The steps are pretty easy. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open a Word document.
2. Click on ‘File’ in the top-left corner.

3. Select ‘More’ > ‘Options’ at the bottom of the left-side menu.

4. Next, select ‘Display’ in the pop-up window.

5. Uncheck the ‘Object Anchors’ box under the ‘Always show these formatting marks on the screen’ section.

And that is it! Now, every time you insert an object, an image, or an icon, the Anchor icon won’t appear.

Method 2: Remove the anchor icon

Another way to stop the anchor from showing in Word up is to change the object or image from floating to inline. If an object is floating, it will move with the text in different directions.

But if the object or an image is in line with the text, it will act like the text itself. This means the object or image stays where it is and moves the same way lines of text do.

To remove the anchor, you can keep your image ‘In Line with Text’, unless you want the images in the Word document to be sorted or formatted in a specific way.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the Word document where you want to remove the anchor.
2. Click on the image whose anchor you want to remove.
3. In the top-right corner of the image, you’ll see the ‘Layout Options’.
4. Click on ‘In Line with Text’ from the list of options in the pop-up window.

1. The anchor icon will disappear and your image is now inline instead of floating.

You can always change back the image from inline to floating by clicking on the image and selecting the ‘With Text Wrapping’ option and the anchor will reappear.

What’s the function of the anchor in a Word document?

After learning how to remove an anchor in Word, you may ask yourself why exactly the anchor exists and what it does.

The explanation lies in its name - ‘anchor’. When you insert an object or an image in a Word document, you’ll see the little anchor icon in the upper-left corner.

When you hover with the mouse over the anchor, it will show that the image is anchored to the text in that precise location in the document. This means that the object or the image is anchored to a particular paragraph. If you move the image, the paragraph will move with it.

Note: You can check if the object or image is anchored to the text by pressing ‘Enter’ several times on the keyboard several times and see if the image is moving with the text.

You can also fix the position of an object on the page with the anchor.

1. Select the object/image and click on the ‘Layout Options’.
2. In the pop-up window, scroll to the bottom - this is where you’ll see the option to position the image on the page.
3. When you select this option, the object/image will stay on the page, but the text can move without it, but the anchor remains next to the paragraph. Also, when the text reaches the next page, the object/image follows.

Another thing you can do is lock the anchor:

1. Go to the ‘Layout Options’.
2. Select ‘Position’.
3. Check the ‘Lock Anchor’ box.

Now, both the Anchor and the object will stay in the same position on the page.

If you instead are using Google Docs to create and edit your documents, you might be interested in how to add degree symbols in Google Docs and how to do a block quote in Google Docs.