Bagging the (Drawing) Canvas

I know the Drawing Canvas was touted as one of the great new features in Word 2002, allowing us to create drawings or diagrams as objects and move them around at will in our documents. That's the cool part. The not-so-cool part is that most of the time I find the box clunky and unnecessary. It just gets in my way. (After all, you can create your image anywhere in the document and then select all the pieces and choose Draw > Group to collect the disparate parts anyway; then cut and paste the object where you want it.) There's a simple way to get rid of the canvas, if you feel so moved: In Word, choose Tools > Options; then click the General tab. Uncheck the bottom option, Automatically create drawing canvas when inserting AutoShapes and click OK. Now when you draw, it will be just you and the selected drawing tool, all alone on that clean, blank page. Nice. :) k