Column icon is greyed out on Xara Web Designer 11 Premium design gallery template

[blueeyez58]

I'm setting up a new website based on one of the design gallery templates on Web Designer 11 Premium. So far it's going pretty smoothly, except on one of my pages (and an issue Acorn helped me with yesterday): I would like to remove the columns that are set up on it now. It's set up for 2 columns, and I just want one. The icon for "arrange text area into columns" is greyed out and won't let me select it. I was able to go further down in the structure of the page mouse over/mouse off layers and delete the column structure, and that worked fine, at first. It's allowing me to type text into just one column on the page. I had already unlocked every other option I saw on other layers, trying to find the place where I could unlock the column option, but I couldn't locate it. The only way I could fix it was to delete the text column that was buried in the layers.

The problem is now that I've done that, the space on the page that I'm working on is not "moving down" with my text. I'm wanting to add more text and the white, open space I'm using, which I'm sure is part of the template, isn't moving further down the page like it did on my other pages (where I have the text in 2 columns). If I continue to add the text, it just starts typing over my footer area. Any ideas on how to fix this? I certainly appreciate any help (and thanks, Acorn, for your help yesterday--it worked perfectly). I hope this makes sense.

[gwpriester]

Right click on the column of text and select Columns. Does this work? If so can you change the number of columns or is it still grayed out?

And I think the text column needs to be set to Push (Right click, select Position on Page > Push and set your parameters)

[blueeyez58]

gwpriester: I tried right clicking a number of times, the column option remains greyed out.

I will try the text column "push" that you mentioned. Thank you!!

[blueeyez58]

Well-the "push" doesn't seem to work on the entire page, just parts of it that I happen to be on at that time. I've tried "stretch with page" and the same thing happens. It still isn't pushing. I'm guessing I may need to do the same thing on the graphics and footer at the bottom of the page...I'm going in on the template and looking at other pages to see how they're formatted.

Interestingly, I just noticed that the column icon is still greyed out, even with there only one column of text on the page. There has to be an option somewhere to fix this part, which I think would take care of the text part pushing the page down further. If I knew how to add all of my headers, footers, etc on this page, as they appear on the other pages, I would just start with a blank page and add all of that, but that's beyond my scope of ability at the moment. Thanks again for any assistance.

[gwpriester]

Is the column an text area? As you can see in my screen shot, the text area is confined in a dotted rectangular outline. A line of text (I forget what it is called) looks the same but when I right click the Columns option is grayed out. So that is my guess.

If that is the case, highlight the text with the Text Tool and cut it to the clipboard (Ctrl x), then drag a text area rectangle with the Text Tool and and Paste (Ctrl v) the text back into the text area.

As far as Push, it has been a long time since I wrote about that feature and since I don't use it (because I always forget it is there) I am not much help.

But do a search (Help) for Position on Page and it should explain how to configure this.

[Egg Bramhill]

In Xara there are three distinct text types. In the text tool:

1: Click on the page, without dragging horizontally. This creates a text LINE

2: Click on the page and drag horizontally. This creates a text COLUMN

3: Click on the page and drag right and down. This creates a text AREA

I suspect your template isn't using text AREAS

[blueeyez58]

Thanks to everyone who responded--I finally figured out using your feedback and messing around with the text areas that Egg provided. I didn't realize there were 3 distinct text types. Now I'm having an issue with the "push" feature; I'm trying to figure it out by myself, if not, I may post a new question.

Thanks again--your help is much appreciated.