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The particular document I'm creating involves folding the page in half, so one side is upside down relative to the other when printed, but when assembled, they're mirrors of each other.

The question really says it all - is there a way to link two text boxes together so that what appears in one automatically appears in the other?

T.J.L.
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1 Answers1

2

You could press ALT+F11 and use macros:

Private Sub Document_Open()
  ActiveDocument.Pages(1).Shapes("Text Box 2").TextFrame.TextRange.Text = ActiveDocument.Pages(1).Shapes("Text Box 1").TextFrame.TextRange.Text
End Sub

This way, every time the document is opened, text is copied from "Text Box 1" to "Text Box 2".

You might want to find out the names of all text boxes in the document with:

Sub EnumerateTextBoxes()
  Dim pubPage As Page
  Dim pubShape As Shape
  For Each pubPage In ActiveDocument.Pages
    For Each pubShape In pubPage.Shapes
      If pubShape.Type = pbTextFrame Then
        MsgBox pubShape.Name
      End If
    Next pubShape
  Next pubPage
End Sub
simlev
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  • Macros are not a terrible idea. I just figured with Publisher's ability to link sections for flow, there'd be one to link them for duplication. Either way, if nothing better comes by, I'll flag this in a few days so you get the bounty. – T.J.L. May 10 '17 at 17:44
  • Some [say](https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_other-mso_other/how-do-i-set-a-text-box-to-automatically-copy/fc8cf26e-92c6-472f-a0b9-a1ec52f22033) they've been able to accomplish what you want by starting with a newsletter template and then copying the title text box, but I couldn't reproduce this behavior in Publisher 2010. – simlev May 10 '17 at 18:21
  • I'll hazard a guess that it's a macro tied to the change event on the text box, which is how I'm going to set up mine. I'm plenty comfortable with macros in Excel, I was just hoping to avoid them. – T.J.L. May 10 '17 at 18:27