You open a contract, run your playbook, and the redlines land inside a strange rectangular box — or don't land at all. You didn't add that box. Neither did the counterparty, at least not on purpose. It's a leftover from a Google Docs conversion, and until it's removed, SimpleAI can't work with the text inside it.

This chapter explains what these boxes are, how to remove them — one at a time or all at once — and how to keep them out of your documents going forward.

What these boxes are

When a contract drafted in Google Docs is downloaded as a Word file (File > Download > Microsoft Word), Google's converter sometimes wraps paragraphs in frames — a legacy Word layout feature that draws a thin box around the text.

Frames are more than cosmetic. Text inside a frame sits outside the document's normal text flow. That's why SimpleAI — and Word features like cross-references and some tracked-change operations — can behave unpredictably around them: the clause is technically floating in its own container, not part of the body of the document.

The good news: removing a frame never deletes your text. Only the box goes; the language drops back into the normal flow of the document.

How to spot a frame

Click anywhere inside the affected text. If a border appears around the entire paragraph and the paragraph behaves like a separate block when you select across it, it's a frame. Redlines appearing “inside a box” — as in the screenshot many teams first notice — are the telltale sign.

Tip
Not sure whether it's a frame or a text box? Click the border. A frame shows Format Frame… in the right-click menu; a text box shows drawing options like Fill and Outline instead.

Remove a single box

1. Click inside the boxed text so the border appears.
2. Point at the border until the cursor becomes a four-way arrow, then right-click the border and choose Format Frame… (in some versions of Word, double-clicking the border opens the same dialog).
3. Click Remove Frame.

The box disappears and the clause rejoins the document body. Run your review again — the redlines will now apply normally.

Remove every box at once

If boxes appear throughout the document — common when the whole contract came out of Google Docs — clean them all in one pass:

1. Press Ctrl+A (Cmd+A on Mac) to select the entire document.
2. Press Ctrl+Q. A frame is part of a paragraph's formatting, so resetting paragraph formatting removes every frame in the selection.

Note
Ctrl+Q resets other direct paragraph formatting too — custom indents and spacing return to the underlying style. In most converted documents this is harmless, but save a copy first and review the layout afterwards.

If some boxes survive: the macro option

Occasionally a frame is baked into a paragraph style, where Ctrl+Q can't reach it. A short macro reliably strips every frame while keeping all text:

1. Press Alt+F11 to open the Visual Basic editor.
2. Go to Insert > Module and paste the code below.
3. Press F5 to run it, then close the editor and save.

Sub RemoveAllFrames()
   Dim f As Frame
   For Each f In ActiveDocument.Frames
       f.Delete   ' removes the frame, keeps the text
   Next f
End Sub

Keeping boxes out of your documents

• Make cleanup a habit. After downloading anything from Google Docs, run Ctrl+A, Ctrl+Q before you start reviewing.
• Ask for native Word files. Where you can influence it, request .docx files created in Word rather than Google Docs exports.
• Paste clean. Copying from a Google Doc into Word? Use Keep Text Only (right-click > Paste Options) so layout artifacts don't come along.

Still seeing issues?

If boxes remain after these steps, or redlines still won't apply cleanly, the document may carry other conversion artifacts — content controls or drawing-object text boxes. Send the affected document to your SimpleDocs contact or support team and we'll take a look.

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