What's happening when you click on that little red box is it's loading up your cursor with the overset text.  All you have to do is click and drag in a new place and it will do a new linked text box with the overset text in it.  If you just want to make a global change to the text click inside the box with the type tool and hit Ctrl+A (Select all) and when you make changes (e.g. to the font) it will do it for all text in the box.  Alternatively just use the selection tool to grab a corner of the box an drag it out until you can see all the text.

It's gotta be there somewhere, try clicking in the text box, using Ctrl+A and reducing the point size until the red box goes away.

Don't be frightened of the story editor Put your cursor in the text box and use Control (or Command) + Y to open it - can you see the over set text? You can click in that overset text and find information about it from the toolbar or palettes. Do you know how to make a screen shot of the toolbar or Paragraph styles palette and post it here using the camera icon above the message box?

Also turn on invisible characters if you haven't, you might find an extra new-frame character or something else that is tripping you up.

I find this continually happening to me in CS4 running XP and importing MS Word 97 documents.

Try everything Kath and Peter said to do first.

Then, when all else fails, make sure you select the text in Story Editor including the paragraph symbol as that may have formatting not reported. MS Word imports can contain style sheet info that ID doesn't report in the Control pallets or panels. Apply your style sheet within the Style Sheet panel and right click the style and choose 'Apply "Style", Clear Overrides' and see if that works. It seems to clear out the MS Word crap. Now click the text 'Out' port and click and drag a new text box.

I've gotten into the habit of importing my Word doc into a blank ID document, click on the text as if you are editing it, then go to 'File|Export...' and select RTF in the drop down menu at the bottom. And then re-import. It seems to clear out the Word crap and prevents venting to your computer screen!

OK, so you have a text box and when you hit return, you get no text showing in the remainder of the text box and just white space I take it. The text shows up in the Story Editor.

Did you select the whole paragraph (paragraph marker inclued) and check the 'Control Panel' and see if you have some huge leading going on or some 'Space After' that pushes the text to overset? Any Paragraph Style set for that text?

When all else fails, copy and paste the text into a text editor like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on the Mac and then paste it back into the text box. That will strip out wierd characters lurking somewhere in your text too.

Report back and let us know what is what, OK?

Can you put your cursor in the overset text, in the story editor, and 

show us a screen shot of the control panel, paragraph palette - I 

don't even know what version you are using, so terminology might be off.

This might be a deeply stupid question - and after all I failed to notice you version number - but when you hit enter to send the text into a new frame - you have got one linked for it to go into, right?

Whew!

I have a problem in that I created a table in InDesign 5 and have been happily editing text in that table for the last 8 years.

Now I cannot, the "table" behaves like an image file and I cannot get the cursor in it to edit

the only thing I can see is that the "T" icon (4th down on the left handbar) is now slantng to the right whereas usually it is upright (however I believe I have had this before with no problem)

Incidentally I believe I created ths table by drawing the lines rather than using the "insert table" process

I have tried to create a new table using "insert table" but I have the same problem?

I can send the indd file to anyone if that would help

Thanks

JOHN

excellent - the first one worked perfectly!!

I save each new file and work with that + had same problem with all my old files as well

many, many thanks

John, I'm not sure whether or not you wanted your personal information posted with your last reply or not. If you want to remove it, just hit the edit button.